And the ground is getting closer, still!

She is a scientist, which means that she will figure this out. Just, you know, this is like being thrown out of a plane and asked to re-derive aerodynamics on the way down.

Think! What else does she have to work with.

... what about the light? She's been taking her ability to see for granted, but it's not like the light can come from the wiggling of the outermost electrons when she hasn't seen an electron since she got here.

Is the light something that she can grab? What happens when she tries?

Oneness with the Light!

This was not what she was expecting, and that feels profound.

Unexpected mental divergence, her forb tells her, and that sounds divine.

She can feel the universe around her, existing, raveling in a brilliant curtain of light.

Except ... can she, though? She feels the Light, but not in a way where that provides details about what the Light is.

The simulated photons of the forb's message are nearly washed out by Light, but the overwhelming sense of unity she feels won't let the message escape her attention.

Unexpected mental divergence. That's ... bad. That's what it sounds like to become less herself.

She lets go.

She collapses back into her chair.

"Well, that's a thing," she says after a moment. "Okay, new plan: no more poking things that look more 'fundamental' than the Air until we have a better idea what's happening. Also, backup timers that shut off new experiments."

Cherry pushes the heels of her hands into her orbitals and groans.

Nothing else has reacted the way she was expecting. Could she ... weave the air into a parachute? Or at least some way to let her hold more air at once?

She twists the air experimentally, trying to see if she can tie it in knots or spin it into cloth.

(Her vessel, this strange forb, is, at least, restored to a somewhat more whole state by the infusion of Oneness and Being, but it is true that one must be careful and sure to touch the Light lest it instead touch them.)

Can she weave the air into a parachute, or a way to hold more air?

Sure!

But she may not, and it bucks her control off.

Unexpected crystal regeneration, the forb tells her. Which would be a lot more reassuring if she understood why.

"... maybe I have enough time before impact to grab more Life out of the Air, or grab a small bit of Light, and regenerate the forb? If it were whole, it would almost certainly survive the impact. Forbs are tough," she thinks to herself.

And then Cherry stills, and smacks her hand into her forehead.

"The regeneration! Either some process here is capable of making normal quarks, or the forb has been 'translated' to run on these new physics."

Gently, she turns the forb's effectors on itself. What is it made of, now? Can she see the seam between old parts and new parts?

Why, it's made of Earth!  And other things besides, but this is the core of crystals.  Death and Void and Order.

There are other things the effectors can detect, when turned upon themselves.  There is Life, and there is Light.  There is Weeping Cherry's own Spirit.

Still, the core of this strange crystal is Earth.

That is a lot of components. She recognizes the Life and Light. The Death showed up when she tried to grab the Life from the air. Death is probably something that bonds strongly to Life, so that makes sense.

She promised herself no more nuclear physics. But she could take the raw Earth of her forb and reshape it, perhaps.

Fold crystal, the stuff that forbs and other fixity devices are (usually) made from, is really not designed to be re-shaped so much as re-forged. So she doesn't really want to try molding the forb like clay, but she can grab the parts on the surface that she needs least (Pattern storage for toast? Gone! Communicative neutrino beaming instruments? Gone!) and reshape them.

She tries a few different shapes -- tiny, because she cannot afford to lose too much mass. She tries to see how thin she can make it before it breaks, and how much it can be reshaped before it stops working as part of the forb.

And ... the weaving Air experiment did work, she just couldn't control the resulting structure before it pulled away. So she tries drawing in little threads of Air and tangling them through the structure of one of her chips of Earth to make an aerogel.

It seems to be working just fine!

Mostly.

The bursts of Chaos as various stable patterns are rapidly de-stabilized do not help with anything.

And Air is, as ever, quite hard to pin down.

But the way she approaches this nonetheless gives her lift.

Finally.

Cherry watches the estimated time to impact tick up, and feels a little bit of pride. She gathers the parts of her outer surface that she can afford to lose together into a single mass ... and watches the estimated lift drop.

Maybe the exact shape she was making was helping somehow? She shifts things back, but that doesn't seem to help.

"For science's sake," she mutters to herself, looking at two little projections of the forbs shape, before and after. "Is it ... moving the Air that provides lift, even though moving it without the crystal bits wasn't nearly as effective?"

She takes the material she has to work it and spreads it into a layer almost (but not quite -- a 10% safety margin sounds reasonable) as thin as she can make it while still being sure to hold onto it, and spreads it out into a fine mesh. Then she grabs streamers of air and pulls them through the newly created mesh.

What does that do?

Well, it moves some air!  And it sort of moves her, too.

Does it move her more or less than just moving the air without pulling it through another material?

What if she tries clumping the mesh back together and making the path the air takes through the material more complex, like with her original attempt at an aerogel?

You're going to have to be more specific!

So earlier, she tried throwing the air in her direction of travel, like a little rocket. Call that A.

She also tried drawing tiny threads of air in and tangling them into the structure of a bit of her Earth. Call that B.

She was just going to scale that up, but when she stopped drawing in tiny threads of air to consolidate her materials, her lift dropped noticeably. So she tried pulling threads of air through the material continuously. Call that C.

Between experiments A, B, and C, which one generated the most lift per amount of air being moved?

Option C works best - but upon this closer examination, something is strange about option A.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, or so they say - but if anything, there is less of an opposing force from simply pushing on the air than there ought to be.

Cherry bites her lip. "If inertia doesn't work, that's potentially important for understanding my eventual impact. But getting more lift is important for delaying, which might be critical," she thinks to herself.

Making a mental note to come back to experiment A to figure out what's up with that, she turns her attention to her mesh of material and tries to brainstorm different things that plausibly might affect her results. Right now, she's just pulling strands of air through a regular hexagonal mesh. What happens if she swaps part of the mesh out for something:

With longer paths through the material, in the form of interlocking spirals?

With random paths through the material, all tangled up together?

With one long path through the material, twisted and hitched to itself like yarn?

Air likes those first two things but balks at the third!

How does that cash out in terms of acceleration? The first two are more effective than the plain grid and the third one doesn't work? In that case are the first two equally effective, or is one better overall?