Of course they can't imagine everything!  They can't even handle the logical implications of the Principle of Explosion!

But there is a power more conducive to logic, of the two that bear responsibility for the fundament of the realm of Azerosa, and it embraces the newcomer as it embraces and unifies all things.

Unfortunately for Weeping Cherry, the timeless places and placeless times are not done with her just yet -

- but Azerosa knows something of what to do with spirits, for all that this universe and its environs are not precisely conscious enough to have such things as knowledge or opinions - and so Weeping Cherry awakens to a very strange experience indeed.

The only constant of the Twisting Nether, you see, is change.

The effectors of her forb ripple not with quantum fluctuations and harnessed lightning, but light and shadow, as they hold Weeping Cherry together despite the vast and merciless change in even their well-ordered substrate.  It is their purpose, and so they shall.

But everything else around her?  For the brief moments she can detect any of it, tumbling rapidly anawards as her locus of being is, it is constantly in flux.  Her own passage leaves ripples in its wake, washing up on unknown shores.

The moment her conveyance pierces through the aperture of a ritual summoning with a sensation best described as sploit, still wobbling around an imaginary threenth axis and thereby tumbling on a wild arc into space as reality asserts itself, is probably best described as a much-needed relief.

Far beneath her - though not, by the forb's model of gravity, for overlong - is a shining jewel: a whole new world.

The world has many disparate environments she is high enough to aim for, with a bit of a nudge.  Does she have one in mind?

The first thing she sees are the diagnostic messages from her forb.

Damage sustained, Recovery failed, the forb tells her in large friendly letters.

The view behind them is what captures her attention, though: a jeweled planet hanging in space. Although, on reflection it's not so much hanging as approaching rapidly.

Collision imminent, the forb agrees.

"Shoot!" she exclaims. At the speed I'm going, should I aim for the water? Probably that will be more survivable than lithobraking, she tells herself.

She picks a large body of water that looks deep and not surrounded by mountains, and crosses her (simulated) fingers.

She can see more than that if she looks!  Though it's not like she has to.

The Water is quite happy to accept her -

- though there is a strange absence of Fire from her descent through the Air, and the currents buffet her with curiosity as she falls.

"... what?" she asks herself.

Even at great speeds, it takes a time to fall through a planet's atmosphere. So she has time to notice the complete lack of compression heating.

The forb's navigation algorithms, fine-tuned to expect more resistance than this, wobble and overcorrect before falling back to a simple Newtonian approximation in the hopes that that will be, if not accurate, at least accurate enough.

Weeping Cherry looks at the things passing through her tiny range. There is recognizable light, of course, but is there anything else? Is there an atmosphere, and what is it made of?

Of course there's atmosphere!  It's made of Air!  (Of Life, of Possibility, of Chaos...)

"Okay, this is fine."

Cherry takes a deep breath of lowercase-a air -- oxygen and nitrogen and water vapor appearing in the simulation when she inhales and disappearing to conserve resources when she exhales.

So there is an atmosphere. And it's made of something with smaller components. Just, not it a way where manipulating it causes adiabatic heating.

What happens if she grabs onto one of the constituents of the atmosphere (Life, say) and holds on to it while letting the other constituents continue past her?

Screaming!  Okay, not literal screaming, but - there is something that can only be described as a rent torn into the fabric of reality, as Life succumbs to grasping Death and all that is left is raw, undirected Decay.

It feels outright sickening to look upon.

That said, it does at least help her crystal, washing over the cracked fragments soothingly as Life meets Order and mends.

"Aaah!"

You know what? In retrospect maybe she should not be doing the equivalent of nuclear physics experiments on a new dimension while falling uncontrollably through the atmosphere of a life-bearing planet.

She lets go of the Life.

Unexpected crystal regeneration, her forb says.

She stares at the alien atmosphere swirling past her for a moment before she re-gains some focus.

"On the other hand, maybe that means a water landing is less survivable than I expected," she thinks to herself.

...

What happens if she grabs all of the constituents of the Air she can reach simultaneously?

She's holding onto some air now!  ...This isn't as helpful as one might expect, but this does seem to be closer to a way of slowing her fall!

She looks at her forb's navigation feed and estimated time-to-impact.

Did grabbing the Air slow her at all, just not enough?

What happens if she tries throwing the air ahead of her like a little rocket, or holding it by her sides and spinning it to try and create a vortex? She's pretty sure that's how a hummingbird generates lift.

She can certainly do that!

Wheeeeeee!

That said, the impact timer...is not exactly getting much more delta-t from these maneuvers?

Which isn't to say they don't work, but it is to say that she's still missing something.

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?

Hmmm...The first one!

In that case she's going to throw together a little hill-climbing optimizer, to find which combination of turning radius, length, diameter, and airspeed works best and let that work in the background while she tries to figure out what on off Earth is going on.

She takes a deep breath and stares at her notes again. Something about experiment A looks wrong. For the amount of Air she moved, and the density of the Air, it should have had a bigger effect. Maybe the density of the Air is changing?

She skims back through the forb's measurements, and while the density of Air is changing, it's not changing enough to explain the discrepancy.

Maybe the forb lost more fixity field effectors when it was damaged compared to power generation, pattern storage, etc.?

She pulls up the forb's diagnostics screen, and bluescreens for a moment. The forb's reported radius of effect is way too small for the volume of air she moved.

She tries grabbing all the air she can reach and throwing it again, just to be sure.

"Maybe something about local spacetime makes the same radius of effect stretch further," she tells herself. But she knows it's a self-deception, and she's strong enough to think the truth.

She's a scientist -- she's used to thinking in terms of fundamental particles, equations, and an uncaring universe. It feels wrong, impossible even, to think that she can do anything right now except through her forb. She's not even running on this new world's physics, not really. She's in simulation, still composed of the same quarks and leptons she's always been made of.

But.

She's a scientist. And science isn't, actually, about particles and equations. It's about looking at the world and seeing it as it is. And she moved the air. She touched the Light.

Her old universe didn't care what she thought, so she made it care. With machines and fixity devices and ten thousand helping hands, she beat it into a shape where nobody goes hungry. Where nobody needs to die until they want to. Where nobody needed to fear falling from orbit.

Her old universe didn't care what she thought, but it seems like maybe this one might. And she's scared. She doesn't want to crash, doesn't want her story to end like that. Maybe she would survive -- forbs are tough -- but she's not even sure if Newton's laws of motion apply here. She has no idea what a collision would do.

So she crosses her fingers, and tells herself that it's not silly if it might work, and tries not to think too much about a mechanism ...

What happens if she tries to just ... fly?

....

She soars.

"Oh thank all the gods," she exclaims. Her heartbeat pounds as she levels out her flight, relief coursing through her.

Now that she's not imminently crashing, she dares to pay more attention to her more distant surroundings. She had been steering for the ocean, but now she wants to find somewhere she can land, and spend a moment reveling in not-crashing, and maybe find out what passes for cells and biochemistry here so she can get a head start on getting her body back.

She scans the landscape below her for forests. You can learn a lot by looking at a forest.

You're welcome!

Okay, technically Azerosa-itself had nothing to do with this, but she will gladly take the credit - it's not like anyone else did either.

Hey!  We helped!

Now, where's a good forest...

Here's a great forest!

(Elsewhere entirely, what might be gods watch with curious intent.)