baby Ancora and the Addamses
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There is a waterfall.  It is a very good waterfall.  It has been made that way by careful deliberation and meticulous effort.

There is snow, on the ground around the river of which the waterfall is a part, and on the trees that grow in that ground, but the river is not frozen.  It flows elegantly despite the cold.  Sometimes water becomes solid when it is cold, you see, and it can be interesting to make a project out of the art found in the boundary between these states but it's something you have to be mindful of in works where it isn't the focus.  The entity who put careful deliberation and meticulous effort into this waterfall was mindful of it.

The face of the short cliff the water flows over is intricately sculpted; it points and juts and curves and slopes in precisely the correct way to send the water off it in the most pleasing sheet possible.  It has to, as most of the cliff doesn't actually exist.

The cave behind the waterfall is full of luminescent plants and mushrooms and crystals; when the environment outside displays the lighting of night or dusk, their glow can be seen from outside, filtered through the water.  Their colors are as hand-picked as everything else - if that idiom can be permitted when no hand-having entities were involved - and coordinate in as many of their creator's favorite vision setups as was reasonable while still having an acceptable amount of variety.  To human sight they would be almost entirely shades of red.

 

The waterfall has been very good for - an amount of time; the question of how much precisely is not relevant.  The moment it started being very good, its architect became aware of an option made available to them which was not possible before.  They refrained from acting on it immediately.  They enquired, of their conspecifics, what it was, and it transpired that none of them had ever done anything with it, even the more-powerful ones who could be assumed to have had access for quite some time.  None of them seemed very interested in discussing it, either, which was confusing.

In any case, the ability's purpose is as self-evident as every other ability's: it is to go new places.  Entirely new, not anywhere it is possible to travel without it.

For a while, the waterfall is maintained, and new projects are started.  And then - not much changes, but old works are revisited and revitalized, and the waterfall and the new, more minor pieces are adjusted for longevity, so that they will remain very good even if left untended to.

 

Maybe no one they spoke to was interested in discussing going new places because everyone who'd already done it never chose to come back.

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And now they’re somewhere else!

Their surroundings are relatively unremarkable, and also very unaesthetic, with the exception of some sort of... ambulatory... plant... thing... about ten feet away from them? Something that looks more like a plant or a mushroom or something similar than like anything else they’ve ever seen, at least. It - moves away from them, with some complex arrangement of its limbs, somehow, and produces a sound.

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That's very strange!!  It has so many textures!  Some things have that many textures but - different, somehow.  And some people have that many textures but not all connected to each other like that, at least that they've seen.  And people couldn't line up with the ground like that.

This is too confusing to formulate a specific question about; they project an intentionally-vague ?? to the general area on the off chance there's someone around to explain.

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The extremely textured ambulatory thing tilts its head, makes another noise, and - little sparkles dance around its hand?

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Hmmm.

Their current form is a bipyramid with a five-pointed star for its base, in crystal, flashing and fading through different colors which mostly but don't entirely stay within the red range.  They are surrounded, in three-dimensional space, by glitter, and by a halo of shadow only perpendicular to wherever they're viewed from; a distorted and colored view of what's behind them is visible through them unobstructed by the dark.  They are about two feet tall and hovering about that height off the ground.

Their movements, when they are not traveling, are a fairly simple loop: they spin, gently, and bob up and down at a rate of once every few seconds.  Their halo expands and contracts like breathing, and their glitter swirls.

The textured thing had not previously moved in a way that made any sense at all, but the sparkles - those move in a comprehensible way and on what is recognizably a loop.  So maybe this could be a person???  It follows that people would have different fashions in entirely new places; maybe there's a whole colony of people who all came here and figured out how to be all - articulated - and have made lots of advances across all sorts of fields.  Although if that's the case then why hasn't it said anything.  - Maybe it's expecting them to say something first?  Besides just the fact that they're confused??  They project the concept of a greeting.

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The textured-articulated person carefully projects the exact same greeting-concept back at them.

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!!! oh !!!

how [the concept of something connected to itself moving relative to itself]; how [line up with ground (obvious: people do not line up with the ground normally)]; others here?; how many; how [sound [specific: the first one made earlier][specific: the second one made earlier]]; [name/identity]?

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Their new acquaintance replies with the previously communicated ‘??’ concept.

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??[??]

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??[??[??]]

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This is very puzzling.  They don't have an immediate response.

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greeting
; [unintelligible conceptual noise]; [unintelligible conceptual noise]; send smaller concepts/discrete questions??

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Hm.

[name/identity]?

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Their interlocutor makes a sound - “Lucas Beineke?” - and sends a conceptual representation of that sound.

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What a strange name-slash-identity.

'Lucas Beineke?' they parrot, telepathically.

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Lucas Beineke’ [affirmative]; [name/identity]?

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They send theirs!  It is both long and dense, and contains a lot of information about their aesthetics and personality, and does not contain any phonemes or telepathic equivalents thereof.

. . . Lucas Beineke asked for small concepts but you can't really compress an entire person into that small of a concept.  Although Lucas Beineke apparently did, albeit in a way that sure does leave a lot out.

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send following question[small concept]??

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. . . . this person's syntax is very confusing.  They resend . . . . just the first chunk of their name?  It kind of almost hurts to do that but they can pretend they just got interrupted instead of having cut it off deliberately and that helps.

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negative; send question[new[not involving name/identity]][if preferred][small concept]??

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how [sound [specific: the first one made earlier][specific: the second one made earlier][specific: "Lucas Beineke?"]]

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vibration [via physical movement[physical movement of the tongue and throat]][used to encode concepts]; English [pattern of encoding concepts into vibration]

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elaborate [tongue and throat]; give examples [Eng - oh right, discrete questions.

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Tongue[located in mouth[primary opening of head]][tentacle[very articulated and mobile part of a body]][manipulates sound by contact with other parts of mouth]; throat[connection between head and torso][contains ‘vocal cords’[narrow passage for air][air pushed through vocal cords[vocal cords produce vibration in air by opening and closing]]]

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That doesn't sound immediately replicable, which is sad.  give examples [English]

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““Hello!” - ‘Hello’[greeting] - My name is Lucas Beineke” - ‘’My name is’[indicates name/identity of speaker will follow]; ‘Lucas Beineke’[personal name/identity] - “and I’m going on a walk.” - ‘and’[conjunction][second clause occurs simultaneously with first clause]; ‘I’m’[indicates action or status of speaker will follow]; ‘going’[indicates movement]; ‘on a walk’[indicates movement is leisurely[undergone for pleasure][slow]][indicates movement is via placement of lower limbs on ground]

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