Margaret wakes up, ready for a new day of work at the CDC.
Wait, this isn't her apartment. "What?!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?"
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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!"
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
"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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?"
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?"
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.
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.
“...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.
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?"
“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.”
“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.
"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?"
"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."
"...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?"
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."
"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?"
"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."
“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.)
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.”
"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."
"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."
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."