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I know I need the gold
Foresight in Terraria
Permalink Mark Unread

Margaret wakes up, ready for a new day of work at the CDC.

Wait, this isn't her apartment. "What?!"

Permalink Mark Unread

It totally isn’t her apartment! Her apartment is probably way less forested than this. 

Also her apartment probably doesn’t usually contain a faintly generic-looking man standing over her holding a small leather bag. 

“Welcome to Terraria!” the generic-looking man says. “I’m Eric, your Guide.”

Permalink Mark Unread

She's on her feet in moments in a rustle of aluminum, backing away from the man. "Did you just kidnap me?!"

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The man completely fails to react or respond to this question. It doesn't look like he even heard her. The bag is steady in his hand. "You should start by cutting down a tree so you can make a workbench."

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Once she's slightly more awake, she realizes her danger sense doesn't register Eric as hostile. She starts changing from pajamas to her full optimized work outfit. "Why do you want me to do that?" she asks. "Where are we? How did we get here?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Many things can be made at a workbench," he says, then "Welcome to Terraria!" in the exact same tone of voice as before.

Permalink Mark Unread

. . . Margaret waves a hand in the dude's face.

Permalink Mark Unread

Nada.

"I'm Eric, your Guide," he informs her.

Permalink Mark Unread

He didn't even blink. Weird. Maybe he's a robot. She tries taking the bag he's holding, pulling it slowly but firmly away from him.

Permalink Mark Unread

He releases the bag immediately.

The bag, which is about the size of a coin purse, contains an immense quantity of Stuff. Contents include: two copper swords, a copper pickaxe, a copper axe, a wooden hammer, a wooden bow, an arrow, a crooked copper staff with a large amethyst set at the tip, a star-shaped blue crystal, a wooden staff with a thin film of green slime at its tip (which is politely not sliming anything near it), a torch, and a handful of miscellaneous potions.

The arrow and the torch feel somehow as if they contain more matter than they rightfully should.

Permalink Mark Unread

Ooh, space-warpy bag, nice. And lots of interesting stuff in it, though nothing with an obvious use right now. Margaret stashes the bag in a pocket where she can get at its contents without worrying if it clashes with anything. Then, if she continues not to be in any danger, she stands there for another half-hour, getting all her clothing and jewelry back to maximum effectiveness.

Permalink Mark Unread

Her danger sense abruptly notes something getting closer with malicious intent. It's a ball of translucent blue slime, hopping towards her at a rate of exactly one hop per second.

It hops on top of a nearby bunny, which violently explodes. Hop. Hop. Hop.

Permalink Mark Unread

Now she's airborne, higher than she's seen it go, tracking its movements a few seconds before it makes them and fishing in the bag for one of those swords.

Permalink Mark Unread

While she's rustling through the bag, her hand touches the blue crystal, which evaporates, leaving behind a feeling of potential in the back of her mind. Now that she has this potential, the staves politely make their abilities known.

The slimy staff will conjure up a little blob of slime which will follow her around and gnaw industriously at her enemies! The copper-and-amethyst staff will fire off a bolt of sizzling purple light which will do slightly more damage than a stardarter! The larger of the two swords is also right here, if she'd rather.

Permalink Mark Unread

The copper-and-amethyst staff is the wrong colors, but then, so is the sword. Also, ranged weapons are better than melee. She pulls out the staff and fires it at the slimeball, wondering how much ammo it has.

Permalink Mark Unread

Sizzle! The blob is knocked back and wobbles unsteadily, then continues hopping around beneath her.

The staff helpfully informs her that it can currently cast twelve times before needing to recharge over the course of a few seconds!

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Then she'll give the slime two more to the "face", and fly a bit higher to wait while it recharges. And she'll switch it to her left hand and draw the sword while she's up there; might as well learn how sharp it is on something that isn't a massive threat.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, that particular blob has just exploded due to repeated zapping.

There's another one approaching, though! Hop hop hop.

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Then this one can get stabbed with the copper sword. (Why is it copper?)

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It's kind of a shitty sword. It takes five solid hits before the blob explodes.

"Copper and tin are the weakest of the base metals," Eric says happily. "Iron and lead are stronger, then silver and tungsten, then gold and platinum!"

Permalink Mark Unread

She's a researcher, not a smith, but she is pretty sure that isn't even slightly true. Or at least, that it wasn't true yesterday. This sword is definitely not living up to expectations, though. She checks herself over in starscape to make sure she didn't get any blob explosion on her.

Permalink Mark Unread

She got a little slime on her, but it evaporates almost immediately without intervention.

"Monsters will not spawn within a walled dwelling," Eric says. "A dwelling must contain a table, a chair, and a light source."

Permalink Mark Unread

That's weird if true, but weird would just make it fit in with everything else here. And the robot guy has been useful so far. Didn't he say something about chopping down a tree? If there are no more blobs nearby, she'll try attacking a nearby tree with the copper axe.

Permalink Mark Unread

Cracks spread through the wood with each swing, far more than one might expect from an axe made of copper. Before long, the trunk is cut through and the tree explodes into chunks of wood, which consolidate into each other, yielding a single block of wood clearly containing more material than it rightfully should.

Permalink Mark Unread

She jumps back in startlement from the explosion, then goes to investigate the block of wood. It's convenient that whatever weird magic was in the tree, or possibly in her axe, made it a cube, but she's not sure how to get access to all the material crammed in there. She tries picking it up, to see if it weighs as much as a single cube of wood or as much as a whole tree.

Permalink Mark Unread

It weighs about as much as a two-inch cube of wood should!

As soon as she picks it up, she is made aware that she could place a two-foot cube of wood anywhere contiguous to an existing surface! She could also make a workbench! Boundless possibilities are open to her, as long as they are one of those two things. 

Permalink Mark Unread

A work bench sounds useful and also Eric suggested it, but she'd like to find a good place for one in case the weird magic decides this is a permanent decision. "Eric", she calls out to him, "Can I move a workbench after I've made it?"

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“Hit objects with your pickaxe to move them,” he advises. 

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That is the stupidest way of moving objects she's ever heard of but okay. She makes a workbench on a bit of clear ground near Eric.

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Now she has a workbench!

With the workbench and the small amount of wood she has remaining, she could make a chair or some wood walls. 

“Combine wood with the gel that drops from slimes to make a torch,” Eric hums to himself. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Apparently she needs both of those to make a monster-free area, so she should chop down at least one more tree. But first she'll inspect the places the slimes where when she killed them, to see if there's any of the alleged gel present. 

Permalink Mark Unread

There is! It’s in little blue spheres, very self-contained and tidy. There are also... coins? Copper coins, and one silver, shiny and round and perfectly smooth. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Cautious poke at the gel with a finger to see if it will make a mess. Also, where did the slimes even get coins? Hopefully they just landed on some dropped ones and stuck to them, rather than, say, eating a person and digesting everything but the coins in their pocket. Now that's a pleasant thought, isn't it. Either way, she'll put the coins in the magic bag, in case she finds civilization and needs to buy things.

Permalink Mark Unread

The gel does not make a mess. It is well-behaved gel. 

Now that she has gel, she can make three torches from one block of wood and one blob of gel. However, she does already have 25 of the things in her bag. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Yeah, that can wait. First, she'll bag the gel and chop down a second tree. This whole thing feels a lot like the descriptions she's heard of video games. If she had ever been into video games maybe she'd have more idea what she was doing; right now the plan is something like "build a monster-proof zone, have Eric wait in it while she searches for other people or a way back home".

Permalink Mark Unread

She now has a bunch of wood, in the form of a single cube of wood!

”Once you’ve constructed a dwelling, you should search for ores,” Eric recommends. “You can find some amazing things underground!”

Permalink Mark Unread

"Eric, you're talking like I need to rebuild civilization from scratch. But you don't look like you've been living in the wilderness. Where do I find other people?"

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"There are many different ways you can attract people to move into our town,” Eric says serenely. “They will of course need homes to live in."

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"Why would I found a town instead of moving to someone else's town? I'm a researcher, not a, a mayor or an architect or whatever."

Permalink Mark Unread

That one seems to stump him. "In order to smelt ore into metal bars for working, you need a furnace, which can be constructed using stone and torches," he offers.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ooookay." She will learn weird video game dimension metalworking after she has found some people who can pass the Turing Test. She takes off into the air, looking for signs of habitation. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Once she's high enough, she may observe the following:

She's on an almost perfectly square island. There's impenetrable fog just past the island's borders on every side. The only sign of civilization is a ruined castle to her west. The biomes are an insane patchwork, snow and desert side by side with a tropical rainforest and a strange area of red stone and grass with unpleasant-looking things hopping around on it.

The air quality remains the same no matter how high up she is, but gravity starts cutting out about five hundred feet off the ground.

There's a woman flying by, with blue hair and wings.

Permalink Mark Unread

Oh thank goodness, another magical girl. Hopefully one who knows where to find a town or something rather than a fellow stranded person, but at the minimum, she'll be company. "Hello there!" she shouts in the woman's direction.

Permalink Mark Unread

The woman lets out a birdlike screech and hurls three dagger-like feathers at her.

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Margaret's danger sense goes off as soon as the woman notices her, and she sees the feathers coming before they're launched. She stays well out of the way.

She's about to yell "Hey, I'm friendly!" when she realizes that the danger she's detecting is of the "environmental hazard" flavor like the slimes were, rather than the "hostile person" flavor she'd be getting off an actual angry magical girl or for that matter an angry cryptid. The entity throwing feathers at her isn't conscious. 

Permalink Mark Unread

This is borne out by its movements; they’re strangely formulaic and exact, like the slime hopping once per second exactly. 

The harpy throws another three feathers in more or less the same pattern. 

Permalink Mark Unread

She would have been delighted by the presence of another magical girl, angry or no; even a cryptid would have been a familiar sign of home in this alien world. But there's nothing to be gained from interacting with this thing. She flies towards the ruined castle instead. 

Permalink Mark Unread

As she draws near, she sees an old man in a red hat standing in the entryway.

"You are too weak to defeat my master," he says without preamble.

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"Bit of a weird question, but are you self-aware?" she asks. How ironic, she thinks, that she can only tell the difference when the entity in question is about to attack her.

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"My master cannot be summoned under the light of day,” he comments. 

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"Another robot, huh? This dimension stinks." She flies back to Eric and her workbench, for lack of a better base of operations.

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"Underground are crystal hearts that can be used to increase your max life. You can smash them with a pickaxe," Eric greets her.

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"What does increasing my max life mean?" If something on this bizzare island can make her immortal she'll take back at least 20% of the mean stuff she's thought about it so far.

Permalink Mark Unread

"As your maximum life increases, you can take more damage and will be generally healthier."

Permalink Mark Unread

So maybe not lifespan directly, but that's still pretty neat. She got enough wood before she went scouting to make some walls and a chair, so how about she does that next. The walls can go around both Eric and the workbench from where she put it, and the chair can go next to the latter.

Permalink Mark Unread

Eric hums happily. “This home is lacking a light source and a door,” he points out.

Permalink Mark Unread

Can she stick a torch to the wall somehow? The physics here is so strange it wouldn't surprise her if she could just push the torch against the wall and have it attach itself, so she tries that.

Permalink Mark Unread

It sticks! A little sconce appears to hold it.

Permalink Mark Unread

At least she's getting the hang of the local magic/physics/whatever. But she's also getting hungry; it's been a while since her last dinner back in Georgia. She can get food, but it's not going to be much fun.

Step one is to get her point count low enough that she has some safety margin, and that means taking off her wings. She sits down backwards in the chair, goes into starscape, and deletes them for the first time in years. It feels a lot like you'd expect from losing a limb, minus the pain: disorienting and unpleasant and wrong. Getting wings in the first place wasn't nearly as hard.

After a minute or so to get her bearings, she turns around in the chair so she can put her left arm on the workbench and take the scales off. Having skin is weird and itchy and it takes another minute to stop scratching. Finally, she appears a peanut plant attached to her arm--that part feels blessedly like nothing, since it's not actually embedded in her skin--and starts harvesting peanuts.

Permalink Mark Unread

"You can construct a wooden fishing pole using eight Wood at a workbench," Eric comments.

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"Does that mean there are fish somewhere? Nice, getting all the nutrients I need from fruit and nuts would be a challenge. I wonder if I can eat those rabbits?"

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"You can catch rabbits with a butterfly net."

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"I'm pretty sure I can just catch them with my hands, actually." Talking to Eric is very much like talking to herself, but who else is there to talk to? Eventually she gets all the peanuts she's likely to want soon and switches to raspberries, which she just eats as she picks. "Will plants grow in the soil here?"

Permalink Mark Unread

“Plant seeds in the ground and flowers may grow!”

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"Well, I hope that holds for Earth seeds, I'll plant a few and see. Three days will show my labors bearing fruit. Oh nice, prophecy power says it'll work." She goes outside and buries a handful of peanuts in rows in the cleared ground.

Permalink Mark Unread

The ground opens up readily to accommodate the peanuts! As soon as a seed is placed, a small sprout appears.

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Ah, video game instant gratification. She'll plant some strawberry and raspberry seeds next to the peanuts, then go back to chopping down trees.

Permalink Mark Unread

Trees are duly chopped.

Once she has fifty blocks of wood in her cube, Eric gently hints, "Use your pickaxe to mine for ores!"

Permalink Mark Unread

She will definitely do that but first she will make a door for her dwelling. Does the workbench make that as intuitive as everything else?

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Yep! She has a door now. It mysteriously has brass hinges and a knob.

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She is not even surprised at this point. The important thing is that now she has somewhere she can sleep without being interrupted by slimes. Now she ought to pick a good spot for a mine, somewhere not too far of a hike from her house but not so close as to risk her house being destabilized by it. Ideally also somewhere near a vein of something useful, but she has no way to tell that. Does anywhere around here look especially promising?

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, as long as she's looking, here's a cave with some clay pots and a wooden chest in it. There's also the dull glint of grey metal coming from a two-foot square of wall.

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Do the clay pots and the chest contain anything?

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Yep! The pots contain coins, torches, and a sizable coil of rope. The chest contains some miscellaneous potions to add to her collection, a gold coin (small but apparently fairly pure), and a stack of ten platinum bars.

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Hmmmm yeah she's going to steal all of this. If an actual intelligent being shows up to complain she will be only too happy to give it back. What's that metal thing on the wall?

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It looks like the stone just... stops, for a two-foot square, replaced by dull grey metal. Either someone went to an enormous amount of effort to blend it in with the wall for reasons unknown, or something weird is going on.

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Given the givens, "something weird" is unfortunately a lot more likely than "someone did something". She stares at it, pokes it, and stares at it some more before remembering the tree-cube and realizing that maybe this is what veins of metal look like when you're mining in this reality. Does hitting the metal square with the copper pickaxe produce an effect?

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It pops out of the wall with minimal effort, collating into a neat little lump of lead ore.

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Neat! And she can probably pick it up and put it in her bag much more easily than she could with the kind of block of lead she's used to, yeah? She'll do that and then keep digging at the back of the cave, at least if her pickaxe handles stone as well as it does lead.

Permalink Mark Unread

Yeah, it's heavier than wood but it's still manageable.

Stone's actually a little bit easier. Also, stone collates itself into perfect cubes, like the wood did. Dirt does too, when it comes up, and takes only one halfhearted blow of the pickaxe to dislodge.

(Stone and wood can be used to craft arrows!)

It's not long before she breaks through into another cavern. This one is dark, no natural light coming in except from her tunnel.

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Margaret's eyes, with their reflective layers and slit pupils, are optimized for night vision, but she can't see more than outlines--and something in this new cavern is dangerous. She pulls out one of her torches and intends it to light before stepping through. 

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It lights up! The flame doesn’t seem to emit any heat, just light.

The torchlight reflects off a glittering red crystal in the shape of a stylized heart. There’s a living skeleton standing next to it, which turns to her and growls.

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And that would be the dangerous thing. It's an environmental hazard rather than a person, so she sees no reason to let it go on being dangerous. She drops the pickaxe, pulls out the copper-and-amethyst staff, and lets the skeleton have it.

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The skeleton has it! It takes five shots to put it down.  The skeleton continually tries to shamble towards her, but is knocked back by the staff every time it tries; the overall effect is kind of comical. 

Eventually it explodes in a shower of bone dust. It drops a silver coin and a mining helmet. 

Permalink Mark Unread

The fact that it clearly wasn't wearing the mining helmet it dropped isn't really surprising at this point, but it's still funny. She wonders if she can even wear it with her horns on, and tries finding out by putting it in the general area of her head.

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It fits somehow! The lamp on the front turns on, illuminating the cavern slightly more effectively than her torch. 

Also, she’s now wearing a transcendently ugly miner’s helmet. This thing is the exact opposite of fabulous.

Permalink Mark Unread

Yeah, no, she was never going to keep wearing it. Blech. It can go in her apparently bottomless bag with the silver coin and the blasting staff; maybe she can use it for scrap metal at some point. Now, how about that glowing heart thing? That looks important in a good way.

Permalink Mark Unread

It emanates a soft warmth and the smell of cinnamon! It’s stuck to the ground, though. She might need to dislodge it somehow. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Mmm, nice. She definitely wants this thing. "Whack it with the pickaxe" seems to be a good bet for most things around here, but this one looks fragile. She'll whack the ground underneath it with the pickaxe instead.

Permalink Mark Unread

There’s a crystalline tinkling noise, the heart shatters, and a significantly smaller crystal heart leaps into her hand. It is apparently edible.

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Edible, really? Well, she doesn't sense any danger when she holds it to her lips, so, uh, okay. Om . . . nom?

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It's like a cinnamon hard candy that, against all odds, isn't terrible.

In fact, it's great. The taste of cinnamon is accompanied by a spreading warmth and something almost like the sensation of being hugged. Then the feelings fade, leaving her with just a faint warmth at her core.

Permalink Mark Unread

Ooh, how nice! Score one for eating shiny rocks she finds on the ground, apparently. She keeps on mining further, if there's nothing else in this chamber.

Permalink Mark Unread

In her mining she discovers: some more lead ore, two more heart crystals, a good amount of copper ore, a generous purse's worth of copper and silver coins, an unidentified greenish metal ore, and...

okay, this one's pretty weird. She discovers a few cubic feet of red-and-black ore. When she tries to mine it, it doesn't budge. In fact, even if she mines out all the dirt around it, it just... stays there, floating stationary in the air, throbbing with red light.

Permalink Mark Unread

She eats one of the heart crystals and bags the other to take back to Eric and see if he knows anything else that should be done with them. She also wants to ask him if the coins are just purer forms of metal, or if there's an actual bank and economy out there somewhere, possibly run by more robots. 

The floating glowing ore is seriously cool, but she might just have to leave it. Maybe it needs a different tool to extract it. Regardless, now seems like a good place to turn around and start heading back to base, where she can have another meal and figure out what to do with her haul.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

Night has fallen. When she exits the cave, a zombie shows up (presaged by a dangersense ping) and groans as it approaches her.

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It's slow enough that she goes with the copper sword, this time; if it tries to dodge it finds itself dodging right into her blade. 

Permalink Mark Unread

It doesn't try to dodge.

The copper sword remains really shitty, but it's good enough to kill a zombie. The zombie explodes messily, leaving behind a copper coin and a broken iron shackle.

The groans of more zombies echo through the hills.

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She scoots up the decidedly meh loot and heads for her house, killing any zombies who get in the way but not seeking them out.

Permalink Mark Unread

Couple more coins, a few arrows. At one point a flying eyeball flies down and tries to hit her, but it dies pretty easy and drops a small glass lens.

"Stars fall all over the world at night," Eric says when she opens the door. "They can be used for all sorts of useful things. If you gather 3 fallen stars, they can be combined to create an item that will increase your magic capacity."

Permalink Mark Unread

Oooh, that sounds fun, especially if it also boosts her pre-existing magic in addition to her blasting staff. On the other hand, she's pretty hungry from all that mining. "How long does night last?"

Permalink Mark Unread

Eric is stumped by this. "Ten platinum bars and eight diamonds can be combined to make a Diamond Staff," he tries.

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"Whatever." Dinner is pecans and bananas. "Want some food, Eric?" she asks. It's only polite, and who even knows how he works, maybe he does eat.

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"You can make a cooking pot with three lead bars and two blocks of wood," Eric says noncommittally. "Many dishes can be cooked in a cooking pot."

Permalink Mark Unread

She notes that down for later, but first she heads back outside and hangs out above zombie altitude for a while, blasting flying eyeballs and looking for anything that might be described as a falling star. She might be a little more trigger-happy as regards the eyeballs than is strictly necessary for self-defense; those things are disgusting.

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Coins and lenses rain from the sky! So do stars. They're yellow and heavily stylized, and they fall in showers of colorful sparks, destroying any monster they come in contact with as they descend.

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Those are some gorgeous stars! The first time she sees one she tries to chase it down.

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It sits on the ground, releasing occasional sparks. 

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Into the Bag of Hoarding Holding with it! How many more can she get in the next couple hours? She wants to get some sleep before dawn.

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Seven stars fall within her field of vision in that period of time.

At one point a cloud is blown by the wind into place a few dozen feet above her, and she hears the sound of a star falling overhead, but it doesn't go past her. A few sparks drift down and fade out around her.

Permalink Mark Unread

Seven stars is a good number!

That cloud seems to have eaten a star, how odd. What's in there and is it dangerous? (Get wrecked, flying eyeballs.)

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, if she tries to fly up into it, she bounces off. It's like trying to fly into a very large, oddly shaped marshmallow.

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It probably doesn't taste like marshmallow, more's the pity. Time to hit it with her pickaxe! 

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Little cubes of puffy white cloud fall and consolidate, as cubes are wont to do. Eventually she breaks through to the top of the cloud.

There's a house built on top of it. Gold and blue bricks, a door with a sun emblem, windows made to let in the currently nonexistent light. Through the windows she can see a chest inside, with another sun emblem on it.

Permalink Mark Unread

Now she has some cubes of cloud, that's pretty cool, she wonders what she can do with oh goodness she's been mining out somebody's house!

Margaret flies up and looks in the window, hoping whoever lives here isn't mad about their foundation but mostly hoping any kind of person lives here at all.

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Nope. There isn't even a bed; there's a table with two chairs, several colorful banners hanging from the ceiling, and the aforementioned chest. It all looks kind of sterile, like an Ikea showroom.

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Aaaand there goes the moment of hope that she wasn't the only living mind in the world. She sits on the cloud and feels sorry for herself for a few seconds, then swaps her wings for arm coating of peelable birch bark with discoloration spelling out a note. It says, Hello. My name is Margaret. Sorry for damaging your cloud. I live here: and then there's a map of the island with her building marked with an X.

She leaves this note under the door, then goes back "home" and gets some sleep. Fortunately her magic can make "pajamas" sufficiently fluffy and extensive that they're basically blankets, and she sleeps in decent if unfabulous comfort in a nest of them.

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When she wakes up, Eric is standing over her again. 

“A furnace can be made with twenty stone blocks, four wood, and three torches!” he says happily. 

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"Gah! Oh, it's just you. Don't sneak up on me in my sleep!" She deletes her blanket-nest and starts starscaping herself clean and fully adorned. When that's done, she sits at her workbench and starts examining her options for making things.

Permalink Mark Unread

She can make: things!

Some more furniture. Walls, made out of wood, dirt, stone, or clouds. Wooden armor or weapons, if for some reason she wanted those. A campfire. ("Being near a campfire will increase your life regeneration," Eric mentions.) Arrows. She could use some torches to make flaming arrows. A furnace, as Eric mentioned. She could make mana crystals out of her stars.

Permalink Mark Unread

A furnace sounds good, as does a bed. Can she make both, with the furnace in its own walled room with a connecting door to her living space?

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Eric shakes his head. "You can make a bed at a sawmill using five silk and ten wood. You can make a sawmill at a workbench with ten wood, two lead bars, and a lead chain."

Furnace and connecting door works, though. Despite the roaring flame within the stone chamber, it only emanates about as much heat as the back of a refrigerator.

Permalink Mark Unread

Can some of those shackles the zombies dropped be turned into a lead chain?

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The furnace will allow her to melt them down into iron bars, one bar per shackle! Then she can turn a bar into ten chains at a workbench.

"Lead and iron are interchangeable," Eric notes.

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Does he just mean that in terms of making sawmills, or what? As soon as her sawmill is done she turns one of her finger-scales into a magnet and checks whether lead and iron are in fact still different on that score.

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...nope, lead is magnetic now apparently.

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Well that has potentially terrifying implications on the atomic level! She's glad she discovered this before eating any of the local flora or fauna and trying to e.g. use the iron in them in her hemoglobin. It's kind of a wonder that the air is breathable, except for how everything here has a deliberately-designed vibe going on. She's still going to stick to food she makes herself unless she starts noticing nutrient deficiencies, though.

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"Fish is good for you," Eric says somewhat reproachfully.

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It's nice when he says stuff that's kind of like making conversation. "Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. Tell me more about mana crystals?" 

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"If you gather 3 fallen stars, they can be combined into an item that will increase your mana capacity. You can consume up to 9 mana crystals. Drinking mana potions will restore your mana, but reduce your spell damage temporarily."

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Okay then. She pulls out three of her fallen stars and shoves them at each other.

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She has s blue star-shaped crystal now! As soon as she touches it it bursts into sparks and the mysterious quality which allows her to interface with the staff feels a bit stronger. Also, there’s a faint smell of peppermint in the air.

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Pretty! And apparently orthogonal to her native magic. The smell of peppermint reminds her to go check on her garden of Earth plants.

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They're progressing steadily! Very green.

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Excellent. She clears a bit more space and adds some apples and some maple seeds; maybe with how fast things grow here she'll be able to get maple syrup eventually.

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As soon as she plants them, little saplings spring up. Looks like this place has very favorable growing conditions.

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It really does! She looks forward to being able to get fruit and nuts without taking her wings off. And when another of those rabbits hops by, she finds herself saying, "If I hunt for food, only my prey need fear.", which solves her worries about the digestibility of local life-forms. The rabbit gets a talon through where a Terran rabbit would keep its brain.

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It explodes! Most of it evaporates, but a decently sized fillet remains behind.

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Once the initial explosion is out of the way, that's a lot nicer than having to deal with innards. She digs herself a fire pit and starts experimenting with getting a fire hot enough to cook the meat. If a torch can't be induced to burn hot enough, perhaps it can be induced to ignite some Earth-style tinder.

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A campfire can be made out of ten wood and five torches! If she insists, though, she can light a fire with a block of wood and shavings of bark.

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No, no, she'll go with the method that doesn't require sprouting bits and ripping them off. It still looks weird even if it doesn't feel like anything. She roasts the rabbit on a stick and eats it.

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Tastes pretty good! Also, being near the campfire makes her feel kind of like she did when she ate the heart candy: warm, safe, and vaguely loved.

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That's nice, except for how it reminds her that everyone who actually loves her probably thinks she's dead, and that she might as well be for all she has any way to see them again. 

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But moping won't actually help, and the campfire is genuinely nice. She sits by it for a while after finishing the rabbit, then puts it out and goes mining again.

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She encounters various veins of ore - copper, lead, tungsten, platinum - and three more heart crystals. There’s a few more skeletons, in the larger caverns. Then, she breaks through into a really big cavern.

There’s another little house at the bottom of it. 

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Yum, tasty heart crystals! Houses are a weird thing to have as a naturally occurring landscape feature, except when you think about it they're not really any weirder than animate skeletons--they're both clearly copied from Earth minus vital context. What's this house look like?

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It’s made of wood. Windows coated in thick dust and cobwebs, through which she can see - predictably - a golden chest. Also a loom. The loom is also covered in cobwebs, unlike the chest, which is gleaming. 

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If this building was ever inhabited, it's clearly abandoned now. This time she breaks and enters. Does the loom have an interface like the workbench, or is it more like a human-made thing? Is there any other evidence a human was here once? 

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The loom is interfaced. With a given number of spiderwebs, she can make silk.

No such evidence. Besides the loom, there's a table and a chair, but again, no bed or light source.

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If it had been a regular loom, it would have been evidence that a person was here. As it is, well, she can make all the silk she wants in starscape as long as she doesn't want it for things not on her person, but she might like curtains or something in her house. She'll turn all these spiderwebs into silk and see how much she gets.

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She gets six units of silk from the webs she's able to collect. They stack into a swatch about the size of a pocket handkerchief.

Would she like to hit the loom with her pickaxe and take it with her?

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Sure, it's not doing anybody any good down here. Same goes for the shiny chest; what's in it?

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Shiny chest contains a stick of dynamite, a glowing arrow (or thirty-seven arrows, depending how you look at it), an eyeball that makes her distinctly uncomfortable even beyond the usual discomfort of finding an eyeball in a box, and an unusually shiny pocket mirror.

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Margaret puts most of that in her infinite pocketbag, and then starts an internal debate.

She does not want the disembodied eyeball.

But what if it's an important component of something?

Nothing that requires disembodied eyeballs can possibly be that important.

But what if there's a way to get home?

That's ridiculous; there's not going to be a recipe for a way home that calls for a disembodied eyeball.

Alright, maybe not a way home, maybe just a really powerful healing item or something. 

Still not worth having an eyeball in a box in her pocket over. Anyway, she can leave it here and come back for it later if it turns out to be important. 

But, but but.

Her pockets are staying eyeball-free and that's final. Is there anything else in this house or this cavern worth examining?

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There's a pot over here containing a stack of fifty copper coins. Other than that, no.

Also, the mirror says it'll take her back to the surface. (Technically it says it'll take her "home", but that concept expands to "the place she last woke up" upon examination.)

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Copper coins: much more worthwhile. Mirror-based shortcut: sure, why not. 

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There's a whirlwind of blue sparkles, and she's standing in the house she built. "Try turning your ores into bars and making some armor, or a better pickaxe," Eric says by way of greeting.

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"Hey there, Eric! A better pickaxe sounds great. Armor would need to be really pretty to be worth it." She sits down at her furnace and starts in on making bars. What kinds of pickaxes, regular axes, and potentially other tools can she get now?

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She can make an anvil out of the surprisingly sturdy lead! An anvil appears to be required for any heavy-duty metalworking, sensibly enough.

"Armor can be worn under other clothing," Eric says. "It's surprisingly comfortable!"

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Margaret grins. "Eric, that remark made a surprising amount of sense! You'll pass the Turing Test one of these days, if only because I'll have gone too crazy to be good at administering it. I'll see what my magic thinks of local armor." She starts getting some use out of her new lead anvil.

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"They say there is a person who will tell you how to survive in this land... oh wait. That's me."

Her best material at the moment is platinum, but she doesn't have enough of it to make anything useful, unless she really wants a nice axe or sword. (Eric reminds her that that "a Diamond Staff can be made with ten bars of platinum and eight diamonds.") Tungsten is her next best bet, and she's got plenty of that; enough for a full suit of armor and either a pickaxe or helmet. She's also got plenty of lead, for her axe and hammer needs. 

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She'll leave the platinum alone for now and see what tungsten armor looks like.

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It's... green. And periwinkle. It's got a somewhat coherent aesthetic, but that's kind of all you can say for it.

"You can designate a piece of equipment as a vanity item and it will lend its appearance to something occupying an equivalent location," Eric says.

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It's not painful to look at or anything, but her standard is "looks like a brilliant seamstress got handed the budget of a royal treasury", so, ew. If she puts it on under her other clothes does it show through the lace or mess up how things hang, or does it play space-warpingly nice the same way the mining helmet accommodated her horns?

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It fits like a second skin. There's a sense of protection, inherent like the feeling of safety from the heart candies, but it feels somehow incomplete. Maybe it wants that transcendently ugly helmet? She could always make a lead pickaxe for now...

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That is shockingly cozy, and if she keeps the helmet off she shouldn't suffer any ill effects other than possibly fewer prophecies. Maybe she can wear it when she's mining or star-catching or otherwise looking for fights and leave it off the rest of the time--how fast can she get it on and off?

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More or less instantly!

There seems to be another option, now that she's actually wearing it, to designate a "vanity item" like Eric said. Her dress for the armor, her pants for the greaves.

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Oh, she can use her magical girl clothes as a vanity item? If that fixes the color clash, she can just go around armored all the time. Convenient! She'll take the lead pickaxe, too, if it's better than the previous one.

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The armor vanishes when she designates vanity items, though she can still feel it protecting her.

With the helmet she can feel the full effect snap into place. The armor is more protective with full coverage, even though it doesn't visibly exist, and she feels like she could mine faster. The lead pickaxe helps with that too.

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Awesome! Invisible armor is the best kind of armor. Time to see how fast she can mine now!

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Pretty fast! Mining before was pretty effortful, but now it's... still effortful, there are definitely still upgrades she could make, but it's a lot easier, especially when she's just cutting through dirt and stone.

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"Wow, this is easier. Still hard, but hey, gotta stay fit. Assuming staying fit is even a thing with the weird physics here." She's sort of talking to Eric, except for how Eric isn't in this mine.

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Eric, not being in the mine, does not respond. She finds a small cavern full of diamonds.

...There's a feeling like something is watching her. Also, her dangersense is going crazy.

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Magic staff in one hand, sword in the other, blink into starscape and thicken up her scales under the armor since there's no room to fly in here, start backing up the tunnel unless the danger is coming from behind her.

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The danger seems to be coming from above, even though the tunnel ceiling is just above her head.

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Then the danger is either some animal that can burrow through rock, or an imminent earthquake (planetquake?), and either way a tunnel is the worst place to be. She mirror-teleports back to her house, then heads outside in case it's the second thing.

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It’s a relatively peaceful night. A couple of zombies groan in the distance, a few eyeballs fly overhead. 

One of the eyeballs seems to be getting bigger. No, it’s just coming closer... and closer...

It’s a flying eyeball the size of a Mack truck, and it’s ready for a fight. 

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Margaret takes to the air to give it one. "You!" staff blast "Should not!" staff blast "Exist!" staff blast  "This universe" staff blast "needs" staff blast "to get over" staff blast "its eyeball obsession!" staff blast staff blast staff blast.

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It charges through the air towards her. It’s pretty fast, and really big; someone who didn’t have foresight might have a tough time dodging it. 

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Margaret knows what it's going to do several seconds in advance of the doing, and she made herself lighter again when she took off; it would have to be really zippy or have a good ranged attack to connect. The question is, are her attacks doing anything other than making it madder?

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There’s a few spots where a particularly good shot has pierced the membrane of its skin and it’s leaking rapidly evaporating aqueous or possibly vitreous humor! It’s got a lot of humors to go, though, and she’s only got so much mana to shoot with before she has to recharge. 

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The next time she has to recharge, she gets altitude and dive-bombs it, swooping down and slashing at it with the sword.

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God, it’s such a shitty sword. It scratches the cornea slightly anyway.

After a few more rounds of this the giant eyeball is looking significantly the worse for wear. It stops moving, just hovering in midair and spinning around faster and faster as its cornea begins to disintegrate.

It’s not dying, though. Dangersense says it’s getting more dangerous.

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When the sword demonstrates its awfulness, she tries a handful of foot-long razor-sharp titanium claws during the next recharge.

When it starts getting more dangerous, she opens the range a bit farther and starts jinking unpredictably between shots in case it's about to sprout laser guns or something. "Guess I should have joined the Paladins after all, then I'd be totally used to this!" she yells. 

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The claws work very well! 

Once the cornea is gone entirely, the eye reveals its upgrade: there's two rows of awful, foot-long teeth where the cornea was, gnashing and flicking spittle (or possibly more aqueous humor) everywhere. It charges at her, noticeably quicker but not enough so to actually catch her.

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"HOW did you manage to get EVEN MORE DISGUSTING?!" blast blast blast blast claws blast blast, circling a lot to send some shots into the mouth and others into the back and trying to judge which side is more vulnerable. The melee attacks while she reloads are of course all aimed as far away from the teeth as possible.

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The inside of the mouth is pretty vulnerable! It's not much longer until she fires off a blast that punches right through the back of it and the whole thing detonates in a shower of clear jelly and blood.

It drops three gold coins, a handful of strange red seeds, and a stacked lump of that red-and-black ore she found the other day.

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Some of the jelly and blood gets on her; it doesn't vanish fast enough for her liking, so she deletes the outer layer of her shirt and skirt and puts them back minus the filth. The loot gets collected once it's definitely for sure clear of goo, and even then she holds the coins in a fire before putting them in her bag and keeps the rest on the ground near her door pending figuring out what they are. Then she sits at her workbench and lets the exhaustion of the fight catch up with her for a while.

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The new ore turns out to be called "Crimtane". With Crimtane bars, she can make a sword, an axe, a bow, a... fishing rod? and... a yo-yo????

"More advanced Crimtane equipment requires Tissue Samples from the Brain of Cthulhu," Eric informs her. "Now that you have defeated the Eye of Cthulhu, I know a Dryad who might want to move into town!"

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"Oooh, are there fish around, I want some fish." She makes the fishing rod, and everything else if she has enough crimtane for it, because why not. "The Brain of Cthulhu, huh, oh that's just great, more boss fights against pop culture references. I would love to meet a dryad even if she's another one of you, Eric, anything with the right size and number and connectedness of eyeballs and some kind of language is a friend of mine."

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“Two people won’t live in the same dwelling, so as our community grows you’ll have to build more homes.”

Also, the diamonds she found while mining are enough to make a Diamond Staff. Probably useful, in case she has to fight another kaiju. 

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She's definitely making a diamond staff, plus swords in every material she has enough of. All of the above will get tested versus the regular nighttime nasties, with her claws as the standard of comparison. She'll also build a few more houses, all the same as her own unless Eric expresses a preference on his or the dryad's behalf.

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Eric could not possibly have fewer preferences. 

The Crimtane sword, called the Blood Butcherer, is definitely the best available. Her own claws are pretty damn effective, but the sword’s got better reach and it cleaves zombies like nobody’s business. The diamond staff, meanwhile, is a much improved version of the already pretty fantastic amethyst staff; it uses more mana, but it fires faster, does more damage and can pierce through one enemy into another. Plus, the staff itself matches her outfit.

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The diamond staff is quite possibly her favorite possession, since her outfit is really more of a body part. She loves it and pets it and names it Daphne. It and the Nobody Can Make Her Call It The Blood Butcherer become her go-to monster-fighting gear, since the sword does have better reach and also has the advantage of not being as gross to temporarily get zombie all over.

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The Dryad, whose name is Faye, moves into the new house as soon as Margaret's out of earshot. She operates a little shop out of it, selling various seeds, a flower called Nature's Gift which Eric mentions can be combined with a mana potion to make a "Mana Flower" which will reduce mana consumption, another flower called Jungle Rose which can be combined with five Moonglow flowers (which grow in the Jungle) to form a magic weapon, and, of course, suspicious-looking eyeballs.

"The Suspicious-Looking Eyeball can be used to summon the Eye of Cthulhu," Eric says.

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Margaret is very happy to meet Faye and buy her flowers! Presumably she takes coins.

Upon hearing about the Suspicious-Looking Eyeballs, she says, "Eric. My friend. Please dig in the bottoms of your pockets and behind your sofa, and scrape up some Theory of Mind, and tell me why on Earth or anywhere else I would ever want to do that."

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"Many useful items can be made from Crimtane," Eric shrugs.

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"You know what? Fair. But only if they're really useful." She still puts a spare bolt of silk over Faye's tray of eyeballs.

That afternoon, she decides to fly past the edge of the island. At first she was sticking near her house in case someone from Earth came to rescue her, then she was sticking around to be near Eric and her house and her mine, but she really ought to see what else is out there. She decides to go north, because why not north, and sets out.

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To the north, there's a jungle. It's extraordinarily green. There are massive pits leading into the ground, which would be unusual in an Earthly jungle.

There are three more clouds. One has a decently sized lake. The others have houses. None have signs of habitation, all have conspicuous treasure chests.

She comes across a sphere of rock about ten meters across with a vein of diamonds peeking out the surface; when the diamonds are mined out, they lead to a compartment made of gold bricks with a crystal heart inside.

The edge of the island tapers off into a sandy beach, with an ocean of sparkling blue water extending into the distance. Not much distance, though. There's a swirling bank of completely opaque fog about fifty meters out.

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So many cool things to discover! She'll check out the fog bank, but first, what's in those pits?

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They're massive. And, as usual, deeply structurally unsound. There's a good number of giant bees, spiky green slimes, and carnivorous plants with unreasonably long and flexible stems. There's also a couple of treasure chests, one at the bottom of a pond and the others in strange little iridescent shrines. In the chests she finds one pair of boots which promises to let her walk on water, one pair which promises to enhance her speed, and an anklet made of vines which also promises to enhance her speed. There's also a wooden chest close to the entrance of the first pit containing a shiny brass aglet, which promises to enhance her speed further, if she can figure out how to actually equip it. (It would probably involve some shoe surgery.)

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More speed is pretty cool! Maybe it will help with flying speed too, that would be awesome. Her boots don't actually have shoelaces, but they do have plenty of metal filigree she can encase the aglet in.

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Encasing the aglet works, and increases her flight speed proportionally! The Hermes Boots can be concealed with her existing boots as a vanity item, with the anklet tucked inside. The three items together increase her top speed by almost 50% overall, though it takes a few seconds to accelerate fully.

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What fun! She flies around for a while enjoying herself, then heads into the fog bank over the water.

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The fog is thick, and damp, and muffles the noises of seabirds and the smell of saltwater as she passes through. Then, after what feels like just a few feet, she's through the other side.

There's another beach, about fifty meters away. Past it is a patch of tundra, with a bizarre structure built in the middle of it, made partly out of ice and partly out of wood and partly out of polished marble. It's very haphazardly constructed, parts of it sticking out into open air, but it doesn't wobble or sway at all. It looks... out of place.

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What a cool structure! It probably has some awesome loot and might even have another robot-person like that castle she visited awhile ago. It might also have something that needs fighting in it, of course, so she has Daphne in hand as she approaches and looks for entrances.

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As she approaches, it becomes clear that this building is floating unsupported in the air. There are landing platforms by the doors. Several meters below is a shallow pool of lava, with a handful of coins scattered about it from unfortunate slimes.

Inside, it’s even more of a hodgepodge than it was outside. There’s a small child in a canvas hat pacing back and forth in a room made of obsidian bricks, a mustached man with a rifle sitting at a golden chair, and a massive chamber which seems to be made entirely of raw meat, with a mildly uncomfortable-looking dryad sitting inside. There’s also a row of treasure chests with little skulls on them, below a panoply of strange devices including a loom, a keg, and a green anvil.  

Oh hey, it’s Eric. What’s he doing here?

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She makes small talk with the child and the man with the mustache, but moves on after a couple minutes each when they prove to be robots.

Oh no, the poor dryad! Margaret takes her by the hand and leads her out of the meat chamber, if she'll cooperate with this, and into a less awful room.

Treasure chests and keg get their contents examined, and the green anvil gets examined as well.

"Oh hello, you're an identical duplicate of Eric! Is your name also Eric or do you have a different one?"

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The child tries to send her on a quest to get him a certain fish. The man with the gun leers vaguely at her. The dryad cooperates with the move, but wanders back into the meat chamber shortly after. 

The chests’ contents are varied! One contains dozens of stacked metal bars, tin and silver and iron and gold and cobalt and something purple and something brown-and-orange and something bright pink and something bright red and something faintly shimmering grey-and-gold. One contains about a dozen different kinds of flowers and seeds. One contains a slightly threatening collection of swords; another contains an arsenal of guns; another holds colorful books, staves, and wands. One contains such an array of junk it's hard to imagine a connecting feature: a Band-Aid, a megaphone, a sextant, and various other nonsense. There's also one containing half a dozen glowing spheres, one with blocks of wood and stone of various kinds, one for some reason containing only a large pumpkin and a stacked bolt of silk...

There's a lot of chests.

Eric's clone smiles vacantly. "Greetings, Margaret. I'm Joe, Ari's Guide. Is there anything I can help you with?"

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She will get the kid a fish but not right this minute. The leering man is an unpleasant surprise; few men back home would waste time leering at a magical girl, especially one with as many points as she's rocking. If the dryad wants to be in the meat room that's her perogative. Maybe she can remodel the meat room and that will make her happier.

"Holy cow, are these books?" She doesn't even hear Joe; she's too busy Reading All The Books.

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The book closest to her has a cover made of opaque crystal and pages that shimmer in the light!

It's full of random scribbles. When she looks at them, though, she feels the knowledge of a spell settle into her like a revelation: Shadecrystal Barrage. It's like a sandblaster, but with tiny razor-sharp crystals imbued with frostfire! The "text" fades from the shimmering pages, and the book is left blank.

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"Wow, that was a weird experience. Benevolent kind of weird, but still not what I'm used to." She grabs the next one and opens it, slightly more braced this time.

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“Hey, put that down! It’s dangerous and expensive!”

Another little boy appears at the head of the stairs, this one wearing crystalline armor and holding a large green sword. “What are you, anyway? You don’t look like a construct, but monsters don’t talk...”

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"Oh my gosh are you a human being? I'm a human too, I'm a magical girl from Earth!"

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“...holy shit! Yeah, I’m human, I’ve never been to Earth but I hear it’s lovely, what’s a magical girl? When’d you get here, what’ve you fought, have you filled up your health and mana yet-“

He pops a safe onto the floor and retrieves a stack of heart crystals and star crystals, which he tosses to her. 

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She snags the crystals out of the air. "Holy crap you really are human that's so great! How are you not from Earth, the Earth I was on didn't have any space colonies or anything. Magical girls are people who can change their appearance and clothing to look like anything as long as it's human enough but not too human and we get powers, I've been here a few weeks and fought the Eye of Cthulhu, how long have you been here?"

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“I didn’t live in space, I lived in the Nevernever. I’ve never heard of anybody who could change their body that freely and still considered themselves human, but I don’t know everything, I guess. I’ve lived here for about three months, I killed the Eye really early but most recently I’ve been killing Calamitas, and it’s been pretty cool but I kind of miss my mom.”

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"Huh. Where I'm from everybody knows about magical girls. Maybe we're from parallel Earths. I miss my parents too, and my friends. What's the Nevernever?

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“Oh, I didn’t have friends, just Mom. The Nevernever’s where faeries live, it’s a sort of hidden world that exists opposite Earth. I’m not a faerie, but Mom is.”

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"You didn't have friends? Well, you can be friends with me if you like! Amd the Nevernever sounds pretty neat."

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“Thanks! What else... oh, what kind of armor are you wearing?”

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"Tungsten, but I'm making it look like my outfit because my precog powers are stronger the prettier I look. By the way, you're cool with me eating these?" She waves the stacks of crystals demonstratively.

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“Yeah, go ahead. Tungsten’s garbage, I’m gonna make you a Daedalus Crystal set like mine. Guessing by the staff you focus on direct magic, tell me if I’m wrong. Nice wings, by the way, what’s the flight time like on those?”

He snaps out a set of wings of his own, fluttering down to join Margaret with a faint sound of tinkling crystal. On examination, the feathers break the light like a million tiny prisms. Also, they’re pink. 

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"Yeah, I mostly blast stuff and dodge a lot. Wow, nice wings yourself. I had a top speed of about one-twenty miles an hour, but I just got some items that made me way faster, maybe a hundred and eighty, is that what you mean by flight time or are you asking how far I can glide?"

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"Yeah, that's what I meant - wow, though, that's super fast, if the flight time's at all proportional I want them. How the hell did you make those, what do I have to kill?"

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"Oh, sorry--these wings are part of my body, I put them on with the shape-changing magic I mentioned. I don't know a way for you to copy them. I can fly pretty far, I haven't tested it exactly, and it would depend on how tired I was when I started and how fast I was going."

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"...that's not how normal wings work at all. Hey, Wyatt, how would I make myself some of her wings?"

"I'm Joe," Joe says mildly. "To make Foresight Wings, combine one of Margaret's scales with twenty Souls of Flight and five Shadowspec Bars at Draedon's Forge."

"Shit. Well, uh, I have one of those things. Can I have a scale for when I have the other two?"

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"My scales aren't organic matter, so if I pulled one out it would disappear . . . Will this work?" She turns one of her titanium scales into keratin and shows it to Ari and Joe.

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Joe shakes his head. "You can't craft with this."

"Dammit," Ari groans. "This world loves dumb jokes like that. Whatever, I've got your armor." He hands her a set of crystal armor. "It'll let you control your personal gravity, along with all the other benefits, but I don't use that a lot, it makes me feel kind of seasick."

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"That is annoying. Thanks for the armor!" She swaps it out and makes it look like her outfit, but doesn't try messing with the gravity yet. "You're giving me so much cool stuff and I probably don't have anything you don't have one of already . . . Want some fruits that don't grow around here?"

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"Fuck yes! I've been living off mushrooms and fish and blueberries for months. And pumpkin pie."

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"Alright then!" She reconfigures from "wings" to "strawberry plant" and starts handing him strawberries.

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"Gosh that's creepy." He pops a strawberry into his mouth, leaves and all, and chews on it. "Nice!"

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She laughs in surprise. "You eat the leaves? Most people don't like them." She eats her own strawberry in a more conventional manner. "And yeah, it is creepy, but it's what I've got and I'm getting pretty used to it."

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"I've never had one of these before, but the leaves taste fine to me. Can you make frostberries?"

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The strawberry vine disappears,  but nothing appears to replace it. "Apparently not, sorry. Is it a Terrarian plant?" She switches to a bonsai banana tree with two regular-sized bananas, and starts peeling one before offering it to Ari.

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"Nah, they're from the Nevernever. You can make pie out of them, it's really good." He peels the rest of the banana, tosses the peel into a nearby furnace, and tries the fruit. "Not bad. Oh, hey-"

He pulls out a book from his bag and tosses it to her. Its cover is faintly smoldering. "I saw you got Shadecrystal Barrage, but this one's a little better for the big bastards. Also, while I'm thinking about it..." He wanders over to one of his chests and pulls out a stack of crystal and glowing pink orbs, then goes over to a bookcase and pulls out a book with a crystal on the cover. He then retrieves a bar of blue metal with crystals growing out of it from another chest, puts the book back, and pulls it back out, now an exact duplicate of the book she read before. He tosses it into the chest she found the first one in. "I need one of those for a project I'm working on."

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"Sorry for messing up your other one. If I had known it was somebody's I would have left it alone." She reads (if that's really the right word) the one he gave her, and also starts eating the candies. 

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“No worries, I didn’t think anybody else existed either.”

The spell takes root in her mind: Lashes of Chaos. It’ll create a mass of unholy purple flame that she can use to blast her enemies into oblivion!

The crystals continue to taste delicious. After eight more hearts, though, the sense of safety feels complete, and the next candy just sits on her tongue, tasting faintly of cinnamon. (The blue star crystals just vanish until she’s at capacity, at which point the next crystal fails to vanish.)

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The one she can't eat gets thoroughly wiped off with a temporarily-extant handkerchief. "Wow, that's a scary spell. I'm not looking forward to needing it, but I'm definitely looking forward to having it when I do."

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“Yeah, it’s cool. Speaking of which, I’m probably going to move on to the next bastard soon. Wanna join forces? I feel like it’s probably easier with a friend.”

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"Yeah, sure!" She's not going to let him get in a fight alone if she can be there; he's a small if extremely powerful child and might get hurt. "By the way, how old are you?"

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He shrugs. "Eightish. Mom always kept track of my birthday but I never really bothered."

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Yeah no that is way too small. "And it's probably hard to keep track of the date here. I've been counting days, but I'd have to sit down and do some math to figure out what day of the week it would be if Terraria had weeks."

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"It's not as bad as the Nevernever. Some places the sun never goes down or comes up, and there's parts where time actually goes faster or slower. It's crazy."

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"The sun . . ..never goes down? But only in some places? How are the sun and the, the whatever the ground is on arranged?"

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He shrugs. "Not the guy to ask."

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"Now I really want to go to your world. How long have you been here again?"

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"Three months, ish. I've been spending most of my time gathering up resources and fighting monsters and practicing evocation. If there's some bastard I can't kill with Terraria's resources at some point, evocation's my best bet."

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"Evocation is something from your world? What's it like, can anybody learn it?"

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"No, you have to be born with it. That's part of the reason Mom adopted me, was because I had magical potential."

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"Ah, too bad. I guess it's only fair, though, since you can't get my magic either. It only happens to girls for some reason. Can I see some evocation, or is it not the kind of magic it's easy to demonstrate?"

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Ari snaps his fingers and says “Kleinesfeuer!” A candleflame springs up above his thumb and wavers there for a moment before he shakes his hand and it vanishes. “Evocation’s mostly elemental stuff - earth, air, fire, water, spirit. For more conceptual stuff you’d want thaumaturgy, which is slower and more dangerous. And I still can’t teach you, because it’s part of the same system.”

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"That's pretty neat! So what was the next thing you were planning to fight?"

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"Astrum Aureus, it's called. An ancient machine sent to investigate the Astral Infection, until it got infected by starstuff itself. At least that's what the dryad says. More relevantly it's big, dangerous, and full of angry."

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"Sent by who? And what's the Astral Infection? Does it have anything to do with the stars I've been catching? And can humans get infected?" She had been starting to hope the physics here couldn't support native microorganisms, pathogenic or otherwise.

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"Sent by... Draedon, I think? He was an ancient wizard? I'm not all that good with the lore, you'd want to ask the Dryad. The Astral Infection is this little biome that spread from a meteor that fell when I killed the Wall of Flesh. But the biome doesn't spread, just generates these stardust monsters, so I don't think it's infectious anymore. And the fallen stars have nothing to do with it, they're just fallen stars."

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"I only just had a Dryad move in on my island; good to know that they know about stuff. If the Wall of Flesh looks anything like I'm picturing, I am so glad you killed it." 

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"Yeah, the Wall of Flesh is gross as hell. And summoning it kills your Guide, and waiting for a new one to show up is annoying and he has a different name than the one you were used to and it's... kind of traumatic, actually?"

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"Your guide died? Oh no, that's so sad. I know they aren't real but it's almost like they're trying, you know?"

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"Yeah. I dunno. The new guy's exactly the same but I liked Wyatt better. And he died, and I found him in his room... I think something kept his body from disappearing until I saw it. Usually everything just evaporates after a couple of seconds, but his body was still there when I got back, and it didn't go away until I went into his room. And then it was like the world went crazy, with the Astral Infection and the Hallow and the Corruption spreading and everything, and I just. Wish he was here."

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" . . . Do you want a hug?"

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"A hug would be nice."

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Ari gets a scaly, four-limbed hug. Margaret is surprisingly good at hugs for someone so metallic and reptilian-looking.

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Ari hugs back for a few seconds, then gets jittery and ducks out. He starts rummaging through his chests some more. "Am I missing something? You've got armor, spells- oh, I should give you-" He comes up with a blue glass bottle with a flower poking out the top, and a stacked blue-and-gold potion, and tosses them to her. "That'll let you keep firing for as long as you have to, without having to wait for a recharge or drink the potions yourself. Just hang the bottle from a belt somewhere and keep the potions in your bag and it'll drink the potions for you when you run out of magic."

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"Oh, awesome! Presumably that will stop working when the potions run out? But I can learn to make more." She puts the items in a pocket, which promptly seals itself shut.