they move like living things | Glowfic Constellation

meta_morph

The metamancer is staring at a wall.

It is not a blank or boring wall in any way. It might actually be the most interesting wall for miles around. There is a complex and slightly spiral-y carving on this wall, with words written around in a long-extinct dialect of a language that has, as far as anyone knows, never been spoken here. And yet, here it is.

This wall is not, in fact, underground, surprisingly. These ruins are in open air, with nothing much visible in any direction other than grass. Lots of that, here, grass. But no people, no other buildings, no forests, no river, no natural resources, and most importantly, absolutely no historical record that there should be anything here. The metamancer found this place by sheer luck, and returned to it after stocking up on enough magic.

The metamancer continues to stare at the wall.

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bold-and-brilliant

And bewilderingly readable invisible books!

meta_morph

"Oh. Seriously?"

bold-and-brilliant

"What is it?"

meta_morph

"I'm not... entirely sure I'm right... but apparently they are hollow inside, and there is a way to open a door to get in... and I'm not sure about this but I have a suspicion there are one-way window enchantments in it and air renewal and basically I think this might be some form of, of tourist cruise or something."

bold-and-brilliant

"Huh."

meta_morph

"Or maybe some form of transportation but it's... really slow, there has to be some reason why it's so slow."

bold-and-brilliant

"Giant stone eggs as tourist cruise sounds like the kind of thing you might find trundling up and down the Godscrest."

meta_morph

"Really? Why?"

bold-and-brilliant

"It's extravagant and silly. Like a lake of gold."

meta_morph

"The floating cities of Teinnab might fit there, too, then."

bold-and-brilliant

"There's floating cities? What happens if they run out of float?"

meta_morph

"They fall. And they're high enough that this is a... not very pretty catastrophe."

bold-and-brilliant

"Given that everything runs out eventually in your magic system, I'd say that's more than just silly."

meta_morph

"It's the kind of ridiculous thing the ancients made and are still around. People are always recharging them and making sure they stay up. Thankfully whoever designed them at least did it efficiently, I could imagine some designs that would take several orders of magnitude more mana to keep up."

bold-and-brilliant

"Still. I don't know, I guess I'm just - I don't like the idea of things that can just run out like that, when it would be that bad if they did."

meta_morph

"Oh it's a terrible idea. Very pretty and austere and cool-looking but absurd. They're above some swamps that are hard to drain without wrecking the ecology, though, and that's the official excuse, but. Ancients."

bold-and-brilliant

"They could've put the cities somewhere else!"

meta_morph

"Then there'd be all this unoccupied area and also no cool flying cities."

bold-and-brilliant

"How do you get to and from the cool flying cities?"

meta_morph

"Cool flying busses and cars and hoverbikes."

bold-and-brilliant

"Cool."

meta_morph

"It is, but still emerged from a terrible and impractical concept. I mean, people now use flying things for transport all the time, for long journeys, but they came from there."

bold-and-brilliant