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Out Of Reach
Permalink Mark Unread

Forming custom demiplanes is a delicate art. Hannah is currently regretting not having paid closer attention to the finer points of said art, as she drifts in interstellar vacuum in an unknown plane. 

She pulls her wand of Air Bubble from her personal hammerspace, taps herself with it, takes a deep breath, exhales. 

Not a Class A, she thinks. There are stars and I'm not dead yet. Probably at least Class C, in which case I might not be dead, period. 

She pulls out a silver circlet from nowhere, and puts it on. Intergalactic Teleport, don't fail me now.

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The stars flicker and shift around her.

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She pulls a hand telescope from her pocket and looks around at the stars. A handful are more than points when she looks at them, slightly more than discs. 

She remembers the view she has from here, tucking it into the quartz necklace she keeps pocketed. She pockets the circlet and the telescope again. 

Interplanetary Teleport. 

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There is a sun in the sky now, and beneath her there is a grey-white snowball of a planet. No green or blue at all.

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Is that water ice? She's already straining her environmental protections guarding herself from the freezing vacuum of space and the radiation pouring off that sun, but she has to try and if it's methane ice or similar she'll just have to try one of the other planets. 

Interplanetary Teleport.

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She stands on a grey-white plain stretching off in all directions. It's perfectly still. 

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She wets the back of a finger, holds it up. Absolutely no wind. Probably still vacuum. 

She pulls out a bag of potato chips.

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The bag balloons hugely, but doesn't pop. 

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Atmosphere minimal, then. She pulls out a simple chemical analyzer and drives its spike into the ice with her foot. What does it say?

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The analyzer flashes a green light.

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It's water ice. She's officially alive. 

She pulls out her desktop nanoforge, plunks it down on the ice. She pours in some of her feedstock and starts it running.

 

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Tent-poles made of carbon-fiber emerge from the nanoforge, followed by thin sheets of fabric and a tank for pressurized gas.

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Hannah sets up her new tent over the nanoforge, epoxying the tent's seams to make it airtight or close enough. Then she hooks up the tank to the nanoforge and instructs it to start producing pressurized hydrogen and exhausting oxygen.

... On an additional note she is going to cast Protection From Fire on herself and her tent.

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The tent eventually fills with nearly 100% oxygen. It's a small space, and she has no air scrubbers, so carbon dioxide buildup could still be an issue.

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She pulls out her enchanted flower garden collection and sets it down inside the tent. 

Air is taken care of to a first approximation. Shelter ditto. It's not comfortable but she's not going to die when her wand of fifty air bubbles runs out. She has an entire ice cap to work from and her enchanted flowers will give her the air scrubbing capacity she needs. She has fifty charges of Create Food And Water and each charge is good for a day. Then she has miscellaneous snacks and candies from her pocket, maybe a week's worth, and after that... well, two months is a long time, maybe she can reprogram the nanoforge to spin her steak from rocks.

She pops open her bag of chips and starts munching.

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Next on the agenda: a beacon. She's already safe, but she could be safe and home and still have a cool new plane to explore. This one could take a while, it's complicated detail work even for a nanoforge and she'll need to relocate, but rocks aren't too hard to find. 

She stuffs the nanoforge back in her pocket, refreshes her Air Bubble, and blips back up into space. Then back down again, this time near the equator of the planet.

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She arrives in a slate-gray wasteland. It's rocky; there isn't enough atmosphere for wind to create sand. 

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She pulls out a mining pick from her pocket, breaks the ground, shovels pieces of it into the nanoforge. The feedstock levels rise, and with the addition of some rare-element feedstock she had in her pocket there's enough for a beacon.

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The beacon emerges from the nanoforge and winks three green lights at her. 

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Oh good she's in range. She doesn't have to search through the planes and blindly jump home and probably land in a Class A.

She 'ports back to her tent, sets up the beacon, pushes the button.

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And there is a door. It barely fits in the tent.

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She opens it and steps through.

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Eva is sitting at her desk behind the door. "Have another of your accidents, did you?"

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"Yeah. Landed in a Class C, so far as I know. Stars and planets but no people."

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"We've been looking for one of those actually, Aura's up on the terraforming rotation again and we want to point her at something worthy of her."

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"Ooooooh. Mind if I stick around and watch?"

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"Go right ahead, it's your planet. You get to name it and everything, it's in the regulations."

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"Let's call it... Calinthea."

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"Alright." Eva notes the name down. "Get back through that door, Aura's going to do terraforming in - " she checks her watch - "Four minutes."

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"Alright!"

She steps back out the door and pops outside her little tent to watch.

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On another plane entirely, in another girl's dream, she flies as a spirit along the connections of a great interconnecting web, lines lit up in white against a background of blackness. Falling into a mirror at the end of one of the connections, she wanders out into a gallery of marbles. She picks one up, glassy and grey-white. It shimmers beneath her touch, turns blue-green; and then she's falling into a forest of green and there are buildings rising from the snow; she scales a building and beckons and roses climb up its side, mark it, transform it, weave their roots into it... And then she's standing in front of a sad little tent and a brown-haired girl. She ruffles her hair affectionately and moves on. There is so much to do.

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A wind passes and brushes her hair and she reaches up to wonder at it and suddenly the world is green and she's standing in a portal hub no different from the ones installed on Arcbright. It's quiet; nobody is here. An abandoned city in the middle of nowhere; but it's ready to begin receiving people. 

This will be the latest Half-Tamed world. People from all over the OTC's network will come here, refugees mostly. Perhaps from Cthonia, it's just now being cleared out. 

Hannah breaks out in a grin. 

She reaches into her pocket, pulls out her circlet of Intergalactic Teleport, and puts it back on her head. 

"I'm the queen of the universe!"

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And I'm its goddess.

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"See you, Aura."

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See you, Hannah.