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eadmund is never satisfied. that's it that's the post
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Eadmund has learned... some of the ways of Ninuan.* He is, after all, royalty of the Host. It would be embarrassing for him to get turned around every time he stepped through a Waylet. But he doesn't have enough Lore in his skull yet to navigate the deep roads, out beyond the snowy countryside into the eddies and whirlpools of nothingness. So it's rather inconvenient when, while he's navigating a rather treacherous path that could be said to have some acausal "aboveness" in relation to a particularly nasty patch of void, something slams into him and sends him tumbling into the black.

A mortal would be unmade. Well, a mortal couldn't have gotten that deep into Ninuan in the first place without being unmade - but a Power, say, some jumped-up mortal with total command of bees or salt or truancy, would be unmade. Eadmund, though, is an Excrucian. Eadmund is a Strategist. Eadmund is royalty, of a place that never existed but did so long before any upstart empire of the World Ash.

So he just screams a lot, rather more high-pitched than he might care to admit, until he slams into some unreasonably real earth.

He picks himself off the ground and tries futilely to dust himself off, before remembering that he's a Strategist and just making it cease to exist.** Then he looks around. What misbegotten corner of the Ash has he somehow ended up in?


*If you were reading it right, it'd have the fancy N. It's not Eadmund's fault λ-letters aren't Unicode-compliant. The Consortium should have more space for infinite nonexistent alphabets.

**Not with the World-Breaker's Hand. That'd be overkill. He just replaces his raiment with the exact same thing, but without the dust. Where does it go? Don't worry about it!

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Su-Yeong tries to picture it.

"That sounds… kind of like the telephone network back home. Uh, telephones are magical artifacts that can all connect to each other to transmit sounds. The phone network is smaller than the whole planet, though, and I never had one of my own. My boss did, he's rich. I think mostly rich people and government people use them, and the really important government people can talk to other government people across the country. Maybe the king has a telephone network of other kings? That 'video games' thing sounds… maybe like the kind of thing I'd have to see to understand, right now my brain's just hung up on… do you need a bunch of other actors? Do you put together your own costumes?"

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"We have telephones! They're not magic! It is absolutely bizarre that you call your magic telephones that, though I can't actually defend my thesis there."

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"You have to know she's not speaking English."

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"– right. It's surprisingly difficult to ignore the part where she is very much speaking in English. Telephones are extremely common at least around here, it's surprising if someone doesn't have one. And you don't need a group for most video games because the computer plays as many roles as it needs to. Some video games you can play with a group but I tend not to. It's much less like theater than you're picturing, you – I was going to say you don't dress up but actually dressing up is very important, you just don't do it with your actual body. Um."

She takes out a rectangle, which starts glowing and emitting a picture of the gay alien she's pretending to be. She taps repeatedly through several other pictures, then turns the screen to Su-Yeong.

Genshin Impact screenshot of Lisa climbing, focused on her ass.

"This is a picture from a video game. If I were playing it instead of just showing you a picture, I would be 'playing' her, and I could make her climb down to the ground and run around and shoot things with lightning. And the computer would show me the place where she is and the people she interacts with and the things she shoots. And the sounds she makes while climbing."

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"Huh! And you move her around without magic? That's really interesting."

Also, pretty. Not just the character's costume, but the image quality and clarity. She's never seen a magical illusion that detailed, though that says more about her personal experience, she supposes.

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"It has been said that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Which is not strictly true, in theory I could make a rudimentary telephone myself but I could not throw even the saddest little fireball no matter how much I meditate. But I think it's true enough to be getting on with."

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"Humans can learn fire magic. Who told you humans can't - right, the World Prosaic."

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"That is ridiculously exciting but I do not think it changes the substance of Clarke's Third Law."

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