In a world of gods and heroes, a wizard and a cleric prepare to test the wizard's latest invention.
A little later, in a world of power and strife, a robot begs for escape for herself and her master.
A little later again, a world of warriors and dreamers receives four visitors.
He casts something to improve his speed, and starts by trying to make enough of a circuit of the place to see what they have, broadly speaking.
Furniture (most of it meant to be light weight and moved around easily), custom carpentry, rugs, knickknacks, clothing (shawls, robes, belts, socks, shoes, bags...), assorted dried foods (grain, fruit, and fish), assorted fresh foods (fruit, vegetables, and game meat mostly), jewelry, someone doing people's names or favorite phrases or words in highly stylized calligraphy featuring animals and plants, live plants, street food, embroidered or brocaded pillows, books, little clockwork toys, someone's advertising that they can record and play back people's voices - and of course sell the play-back equipment, as well as recordings of popular songs and poems recited by a local performer...
He's briefly distracted by the clothing, stops for a moment to look at the calligraphy, and lets one of the street-food vendors tempt him into buying something, before he gets to the toys, which he notes the location of before moving on. He stops again at the recording shop, to have a closer look and maybe talk to the vendor; he'll listen to the general spiel before asking questions, though.
It's a technological marvel! Listen to your most beloved songs in the comfort of your own home! Have a unique memento to keep!
The vendor can also talk quite at length about the marvelous properties of sound and how it works rather like striking a very particular glass for a certain tune, over and over (of course, the actual details of how the machine works are proprietary).
He compliments the vendor on how clever the devices are and buys one that plays a song, asking as he pays whether the vendor knows of anyone selling other interesting machines today.
Well, depends on how you define interesting. There's clocks, some of them quite complicated, and clockwork toys, and someone made a steam toy...
Oh, yes, all of those. Maybe the steam toy first, if it's especially unusual; does the vendor mind giving directions?
If this seems like a workable way to navigate the marketplace he'll spend a while at it, likely all the way through to dinnertime.
The vendor gives directions!
Assorted other interesting things that he gets directed to includes books - travelogues with printed images, a book of plants of the Land of Fire, fictional books, science books, someone has purported to have put together a history of the late Empire - and someone selling an electric heating device (with many warnings about not setting it on or near anything flammable) and assorted other odd toys.
Ooh, press-printing makes books marvelously inexpensive. He gets a few travelogues, a couple of science books, and the book of plants, along with a variety of toys and gadgets, making a point of getting at least one with each method of functioning, storing the smallest ones in his belt and going back to the inn a few times to drop the bigger ones off in the room.
Come dinnertime, he picks up takeout and brings Ertan and it back to the room; the halfling is in a good enough mood to be interested in hearing about his afternoon and looking at some of the less intimidating machines.
They make an early night of it, and Raafi's up before dawn to go wandering and prepare his spells.
Ertan sleeps in a little. About twenty minutes after he wakes up - well, you might think someone just died, from the emotions he's giving off.
Tobirama will find Raafi to let him know his friend seems to be experiencing some kind of intense negative emotion.
He teleports back to check on him.
The halfling's mood is only moderately improved by the time that Raafi seeks Tobirama out again, an hour or so later.
He nods. "We're, ah, stuck. Ertan's magic is too complicated to prepare from memory; he needs his spellbook, and he didn't pack it."
"That does sound like a problem. Will he be able to reconstruct it? I can also make researching interdimensional travel on my end a higher priority, if you or your world won't have a solution soon."
"We'd appreciate that, thank you. There are people from my world who will look for me, but I don't know which of their spells will work between worlds, and it'll take years at best for Ertan to recreate his spells."
"I don't know what my development time will be like there, since I haven't tried this before. Likely I will have blind jumps first and can just send clones through."
"It's something, at least. Have you given any thought to what you'll want from us for staying?"
"By spell and caster tier, the same as any other spell; effects other than wound healing start at third tier, except one spell of second tier that removes magically induced paralysis."
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
