Return to sender. Please. | Glowfic Constellation

wind_on_my_face

He follows.

norbird

Along the way, she points at herself and enunciates, "Lirieth."

wind_on_my_face

“Lir–ith.”

“Thanjen.”

norbird

Lirieth nods encouragingly. "Thanjen," she repeats, doing a better job with his vowels than he did with hers.

wind_on_my_face

Little map of what he's seen of the building, pointed at.

norbird

She nods, and points at the building map and gestures at the hallway around them, and gives a multi-word name.

wind_on_my_face

He shrinks it and adds vague representations of land and other buildings and people.

norbird

Lirieth looks thoughtful, then glances around the hallway they're currently traversing and heads for one of the rooms, beckoning Thanjen to follow. It appears to be a classroom: big desk at the front, lots of little desks facing it, and - this must be what she was looking for - large paper maps hanging on the walls.

She goes up to a map that looks like it represents a city, and points out their building on that. Then she names the city. Then she points out the city on the country-scale map next to that one, names the country, and points it out in turn on the third, continent-scale map; it's the wiggly peninsula on the far right. None of these locations look or sound familiar.

wind_on_my_face

He studies the map for a bit.

(Discussing this will require more words.)

Then turns to Lirieth and repeats the “leaving” gesture. (Though it's probably not actually relevant any more.)

norbird

Lirieth nods, and resumes leading him out of the building. Hallway, hallway, stairs, more hallway. It's a pretty big building, apparently, and one with very few windows.

wind_on_my_face

(And yet someone took the trouble to build it out of stone. Well, if that really was a completely different world map —)

He follows along.

norbird

They go up some more stairs and reach another hallway. This one has windows! The windows are large and clear and display a beautiful view of the city.

It's a weird city. For one thing, there's a bright blue column of light visible in the distance, rising from behind the skyline to compete on equal footing with the warm afternoon sun. For another thing, there's something subtly weird about the architecture. Lots of stone.

This might be a good moment to note that since the moment he got here, Thanjen has not seen anyone directly manipulating any matter other than their own bodies.

wind_on_my_face

(Well, that's entirely plausible happenstance. The blue light thing, on the other hand, doesn't look like anything that would be possible that he's ever heard of.)

He turns away from the window and says, "We will need more words for all of this," along with pointing at the two of them, his mouth, and everything else that's there to be pointed at.

norbird

Nod nod nod!

Lirieth leads him down the windowed hall, and a few more halls after that, and then up a short flight of stairs into a room with one stone wall and three made almost entirely of glass. The light of the sun and the mysterious blue glow shine in on an amazing variety of potted plants in all sizes, shapes, and colours, including several respectably medium-sized trees.

Amid all this greenery, a woman wearing a red halter-top dress sits and tends to a mysterious object. The woman is three feet tall and has wings like a dragonfly's. The mysterious object is a wooden pedestal with glowing green vapours circling unnaturally around it.

Lirieth greets the winged woman, and the winged woman looks up from braiding smoke to smile at Thanjen while Lirieth introduces him and presumably explains his situation.

wind_on_my_face

No comment seems obviously called for, but Thanjen tries to smile politely and stays well back from the inexplicably glowing gas.

norbird

The winged woman nods as Lirieth finishes her explanation. She tugs a strand of glowing smoke away from the pedestal, twirls it between her fingers, and starts weaving it with itself. The smoke is clearly not solid - when she moves slightly too fast, it eddies around her fingertips and she has to reposition her hand to catch it again - but she is just as clearly relying on her actual hands to manipulate it, and when she spins and twists and braids it, it stays spun and twisted and braided even as it drifts vaporously through the air.

Lirieth turns to Thanjen and attempts to convey by mime and gesture that the winged woman is doing something with the goal of improving his ability to communicate with them.

wind_on_my_face

norbird

The winged woman finishes what she's doing and tosses the bit of woven smoke toward Lirieth. It floats across the room in no particular hurry, and when Lirieth catches it, it twines affectionately around her fingers like a small curious animal made of glowing green smoke.

"Did that work?" asks Lirieth, perfectly intelligibly although she's still speaking the previously-indecipherable local language.

wind_on_my_face

"Apparently."

norbird

"Good!" she says, pleased. "So, this is a translation spell. It should make you mutually comprehensible to anyone you speak to as long as you have it." She offers Thanjen the smoke-creature.

wind_on_my_face

He cautiously encapsulates it and adds it to the miscellany floating at his waist.

"All right. How did I get here?"

norbird

The smoke-creature wiggles happily in its new enclosure and chases its own wispy tail in tiny circles.

"I wasn't there for the beginning," says Lirieth, "but I think that team was working on teleportation artifacts, something must have gone wrong with their prototype."

wind_on_my_face

"I hope they can reverse whatever it was, seeing as this seems to be not even the same planet, or maybe universe."

norbird

"Really? Oh, that reminds me, I wanted to ask - how did you get your lifeforce so entangled with all those floating objects?"

wind_on_my_face