PAGDTenno
Verified Warmind. Probably on fire.
- Location
- South Carolina
In the US two to a bedroom is the norm, with two bedrooms sharing a small common area, and one restroom per bedroom.
Beyond Our Reach (the Stars Did Form)
- Thread starter ensou
- Start date
- Original Sci-Fi
In the US two to a bedroom is the norm, with two bedrooms sharing a small common area, and one restroom per bedroom.
Or two people per room and one shared bathroom per gender for the entire floor. Sometimes both versions across the same campus.
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Really enjoying this story so far. I just started reading it recently. I don't know where this is going but I'm enjoying it, and will be watching.
I think it might be useful for people who didn't obssessively read and reread McCaffrey's complete oeuvre as a teenager, that Angharad Evans is something of a reference to Angharad Gwyn, more commonly known as The Rowan, main character from the book The Rowan and a recurring character in later books like Damia (about her daughter), Damia's Children (The Rowan's grandchildren) etc. In those books, Angharad/The Rowan was a T-1 Telekinetic / Teleporter / Telepath, who ultimately ran a station on Callisto.
The hair is the same odd colour in those books as it is here, but by far the weirdest thing about her description throughout is her eyes. In The Rowan, her eyes are described as follows at age three - "A bit odd-looking with that whitened hair and those enormous brown eyes in that thin face". Later in the book, the Rowan as an adult is described as having gray eyes - "but she had bequeathed her gray eyes to her daughter and the narrow face." The character in this story's eye coloration in this story is described as "bright green" - which matches Anne McCaffrey herself ("My eyes are green, my hair is silver and I freckle; the rest is still subject to change without notice") but not either version of the character.
As best I can make out / recall of coverart, in the original The Rowan coverart by Romas Kukalis, Romas gave her brown eyes, but in the more recent cover by Danny O'Leary they're gray. In Damia, for whatever it's worth, The Rowan has gray eyes ("Her gray eyes pierced him.")
Is the colour here a way of poking fun at the canonical inconsistency in description?
I think it might be useful for people who didn't obssessively read and reread McCaffrey's complete oeuvre as a teenager, that Angharad Evans is something of a reference to Angharad Gwyn, more commonly known as The Rowan, main character from the book The Rowan and a recurring character in later books like Damia (about her daughter), Damia's Children (The Rowan's grandchildren) etc. In those books, Angharad/The Rowan was a T-1 Telekinetic / Teleporter / Telepath, who ultimately ran a station on Callisto.
The hair is the same odd colour in those books as it is here, but by far the weirdest thing about her description throughout is her eyes. In The Rowan, her eyes are described as follows at age three - "A bit odd-looking with that whitened hair and those enormous brown eyes in that thin face". Later in the book, the Rowan as an adult is described as having gray eyes - "but she had bequeathed her gray eyes to her daughter and the narrow face." The character in this story's eye coloration in this story is described as "bright green" - which matches Anne McCaffrey herself ("My eyes are green, my hair is silver and I freckle; the rest is still subject to change without notice") but not either version of the character.
As best I can make out / recall of coverart, in the original The Rowan coverart by Romas Kukalis, Romas gave her brown eyes, but in the more recent cover by Danny O'Leary they're gray. In Damia, for whatever it's worth, The Rowan has gray eyes ("Her gray eyes pierced him.")
Is the colour here a way of poking fun at the canonical inconsistency in description?
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ensou
Magical G̶i̶r̶l̶ Servant Mordred-chan
- Location
- NEW YORK CITY!??
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I random-generated the base characteristics. Tactile telekinesis, white hair, green eyes. I was like "really"?
And then one of the names the name generator gave me in its list of like ten was "Angharad".
...At which point I threw my hands up and decided if the universe was seriously going to conspire to push me to have (practically) an expy of the main character from the original series the power system was based on I might as well have fun with it. Which is why Angie's got the bronzed/darker skin (though the new cover has her much more pale, which I'm unsure how to feel about) and from Britain with the accent and everything to honor Anne McCaffrey.
Also I am inordinately pleased that someone finally called that out. I was wondering when (if) it would ever happen.
And then one of the names the name generator gave me in its list of like ten was "Angharad".
...At which point I threw my hands up and decided if the universe was seriously going to conspire to push me to have (practically) an expy of the main character from the original series the power system was based on I might as well have fun with it. Which is why Angie's got the bronzed/darker skin (though the new cover has her much more pale, which I'm unsure how to feel about) and from Britain with the accent and everything to honor Anne McCaffrey.
Also I am inordinately pleased that someone finally called that out. I was wondering when (if) it would ever happen.
Unseelie
(Verified True Fae)
- Location
- Tír fo Thuinn
...I'm so happy I have a room and bathroom for myself and only share the kitchen.
Okay. Angie's adorable. Can we keep her? 
More seriously, I feel like she's a good balance for our exuberance as long as we (or she doesn't let us) run roughshod over her.
As for our Talent... Space is Empty. I... think we might have been doing both of the main proposed ideas. That is Higher Dimensional Viewing and Gravitic Wave Detection.
The 90o thing makes me want to say we... looked at Reality sideways. Or maybe from top-down. Not important really, just that we were viewing our Reality from an angle that doesn't actually exist in our reality, but was tuned specifically towards detecting gravitic waves?
More seriously, I feel like she's a good balance for our exuberance as long as we (or she doesn't let us) run roughshod over her.
As for our Talent... Space is Empty. I... think we might have been doing both of the main proposed ideas. That is Higher Dimensional Viewing and Gravitic Wave Detection.
The 90o thing makes me want to say we... looked at Reality sideways. Or maybe from top-down. Not important really, just that we were viewing our Reality from an angle that doesn't actually exist in our reality, but was tuned specifically towards detecting gravitic waves?
- Location
- Elsewhere
A gravity well might be much easier to see from the side, but since they are already a 3-d distortion we run out of sides to look at.
If only we could rotate the universe...
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Pretty much, yeah.
And while that pic is good for explaining my point, I always thought those were bad examples for how Gravity affects Space-Time.
Just... Gravity Pulls. It's as simple as that really. Although my favorite example if I have to choose one to use is that the farther a satellite is from Earth in orbit around it, the more off-set the clocks become compared to matching ones on the surface. Although it's only a very small measure of micro-seconds per year.
The sad fact of the matter is that the set of good examples for how gravity and space-time relate in real life consists of assorted mathematical equations (that require approximately a bachelor's degree of mathematical understanding), and reality itself. We get all the other examples from when lay people say to experts, "Those equations make my eyes bleed, can you explain it in words or pretty pictures?" To which the experts reply, " I'm really more of a math person, but I'll try my best."
PAGDTenno
Verified Warmind. Probably on fire.
- Location
- South Carolina
I'm pretty sure this is why the math behind GPS involves both general and special relativity.
Recovery
ensou
Magical G̶i̶r̶l̶ Servant Mordred-chan
- Location
- NEW YORK CITY!??
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It takes you about fifteen minutes to pull yourself back together. By the time you're fully lucid and out of the fuzziness, you find your hand is being held by Angharad —who's sitting on the floor next to you and leaning on the wheelchair— with Natalie also seated on the floor watching you, and a half-full bottle of water you don't clearly remember getting or drinking in your free hand.
Peter and Dr. Liang are in the booth, looking at something below the window and gesturing.
"They're trying to figure out what happened, and if something went wrong," Nat says.
You shake your head. You know there was nothing wrong.
Natalie twists around, waving her arms and getting the attention of the two in the booth, and then motioning to come out.
They emerge a moment later, walking over to you.
"Are you okay? We were thinking about taking you to the medical center, but you seemed to be getting better on your own pretty quickly," Peter tells you. "Nat got you some water and that seemed to help, too."
You shake your head at the thought of ending up on a stretcher again. You've had enough of infirmaries for the next week.
"I'm fine," you tell them, and you aren't even sure if it's a lie or not. You'll hold your opinion.
Dr. Liang bites her lip and crosses her arms. "Can you tell us anything about what happened?"
"I wasn't ready for it," you say, and it's the truth. The worst part wasn't the nothingness, not… not really, it was how unprepared you were for it. That's what made it so shocking and terrifying. "It was… nothing. Literally, nothing," you tell them.
"I-I couldn't see, couldn't hear, couldn't taste, or smell, or touch. And I couldn't even feel myself."
That was probably the worst.
"What do you mean?" the professor asks. "Internal sensations? Like proprioception, pain, hunger, thirst, physical weariness?"
You nod.
She frowns. "That's… unusual."
"The only things I had were the direction and…" You blink. You hadn't even realized it, but… "The two objects."
"The 'two objects'?" Peter repeats.
You nod. "One is fifty-six million two hundred ninety-one thousand eight hundred six miles that way," you say, pointing nearly up but a little off. "The other is nine thousand four hundred eighty three miles that way." Your other hand points almost perfectly straight down but a few fractions of a degree off.
"Uh, Amy?" Angharad says, getting your attention.
"Yeah?"
"…That's the Sun. And Haeld."
…Oh. "Oh," you say dumbly. That would make sense. You let your hands drop. "Well then."
"Have you always been that precise with distances?" Dr. Liang asks.
You shake your head. "It's just those two things. I know where they are."
"Hmmm," she hums thoughtfully.
"Um. What did it look like out here?"
Angharad shakes her head slowly, her face slightly pale.
"It was pretty freaky. Really freaky," Nat says. "And I tried to cancel you, but it wouldn't work."
"Is there a video or something?" you ask.
The professor nods, and there's suddenly a visual ping as your runner has access to the file.
You open it, letting your runner open broadcast the program so the others can see it as well and it doesn't look like you're just playing with empty space.
It's actually a full holo, three dimensional and everything, but you adjust it so that you're looking at it from about the same view as the others would have.
You start it, and everything is still, you just see yourself sitting there. Nothing changes.
And then without warning you deform, everything about you compressing impossibly, your knees getting closer to your hips even when the wheelchair hasn't changed, your front getting smaller and sides becoming visible, looking like you're turning inside out before suddenly you're just not there.
What the hell.
There's nothing, and you fast-forward, holo-Natalie appearing in the room and becoming more and more stressed, pacing around, biting her knuckle, until you hit the eight minute mark, and you're suddenly there, filling out until everything settles back into place, the same as what you'd seen at the start, just in reverse.
You go back to the beginning, and adjust the view so that you're looking down at the room as a cube from the corner that's currently your upper left. The video plays out, and this time it's even more nauseating, the geometries impossible and just not making sense. You clearly don't move an inch, and your knees are at the front edge of the seat and your butt at the back, and the wheelchair doesn't change, and you know you're still taking up the same volume and distance, but somehow you appear to get thinner and thinner, the distances shortening, your body flattening and sides becoming visible, back somehow expanding to match the rest, until you can't get any more thin and just disappear.
You look up from the holo, everybody else staring at you. "That was…"
"Yeah," Peter agrees. "Like someone combined Escher and Dalí and decided you'd be the perfect way to bring it to life."
Greeaaaaat.
"The parts with you appearing and disappearing are slowed down by about twenty-five times," Dr. Liang tells you. "The room automatically moves to a much, much higher sample rate when it notices activity, but that's far too slow to really see what's happening and is only really useful for very detailed analysis."
It looked like it took about seven and a half seconds. Point seven five over two point five is… zero point three. That all happened in point three seconds.
You go back to the video and alter the speed of the segment that the professor was talking about to real-time, and then watch, and oh my god that's even worse.
It happens so fast that you don't get anything other of an extremely disturbing sense of utter wrongness and impossibility before it's gone, leaving you no time to process it, the vision of you turning inside out burned into your mind and playing over and over. The suddenness is even more jarring and shocking than the drawn-out version, and it make the entire event all that much worse.
And you weren't even turning that fast!
Ugh.
You rub the heel of your right hand against your forehead.
"I was… turning," you tell them. "That's all I really know. I turned, and then nothing. And I… I wasn't ready for it. It was nothing. So I turned back."
"Having adverse reactions to your own Talent is rare, but it does happen," Dr. Liang tells you. "Sometimes the person even rejects it completely."
You shake your head. That's not it. What you experienced was extremely unnerving and scary, but it was the shock and that you were caught so off guard that really made it as absolutely terrifying as it was. Now that you knew what it was like, you felt like it might not be so bad. Like watching a scary movie the first time versus the second time.
Besides, you're here to learn your Talent. It may be disturbing and unnatural and absolutely terrifying, but it's yours. It's yours, and it's not some useless little Talent. You can go away in less than a second, and that's not a small thing.
"No," you say with finality. You're not running away from this.
…But you also really don't want to try anything with it again right now.
The professor sighs. "Well, the good news is that what you did wasn't dangerous. Honestly, it's probably one of the tamer things I've seen come out of a Talent, considering I specialize in abnormal expressions. You're not doing anything to your environment, or to the people around you, just something to yourself. Of course, we also weren't getting any readings from the sensor ring after you disappeared, but until you did there wasn't anything out of the ordinary."
You nod.
"Since this is your first time, you probably don't have a good enough feel of yourself to be able to gestalt with anything yet, much less a Generator, so we can't evaluate your channeling. Or energy production."
You're pretty sure you're okay with that. "Do you… do you have any idea what it is?" you ask her. She's a researcher, right? If anyone should have an idea, it's her.
Unfortunately, it seems not, because she shakes her head. "Not the specifics, no. I can say with almost a hundred-percent certainty that it's a Warping ability, though. It's the only class you find Talents that mess with space like that. But I've never seen or heard about anything like what you did." She smiles. "So even if this didn't turn as happy as we hoped, I suppose I should be thanking you, it's not every day I get to see something completely new, especially something that dramatic or exciting. I might actually look into it some more, if you don't mind?"
You shake your head.
"I'm guessing you wouldn't be up for trying anything else today, either?" she asks, but sounding like she already knows the answer, and not minding.
"Sorry," you apologize quietly. You had really hoped you'd be able to get a lot out of this, too, or at least a clearer picture than you did.
"No. It's not anybody's fault," she tells you. "Can't help what you can't control."
That's fair, you think, though you're still a bit disappointed even with the memories of that place fresh in your mind.
"C'mon. How about Nat and I take you two out for ice cream or something?" Peter offers. "The place here on campus should be open, even if it's limited hours today."
You can't help but perk up a little at that. This was supposed to be an adventure today, and it's not even been three hours! And you did learn about your Talent, even if it wasn't all that great an experience, but it's enough to help you pick your classes now!
You look at Angie, and she nods a little, so you turn back to facing the older people. "Okay!"
He smiles. "Nat?"
The older girl shrugs. "Sure, I'd be up for it."
"Alright then," he says and moves to walk around you, you turning to follow as he walks towards the exit door. You hear footsteps behind you, so the other two must be following you.
At the door, Peter stops and turns around. "Thank you for helping us Dr. Liang!"
Oh! You swivel around to face the professor, who's at the other end of the room. "Yeah! Thanks!" you yell.
She just waves you off. "Of course!" she calls across the open space.
Peter leads you out the heavy door and back down the hallways to the elevator you'd come from.
"So, um, you're a telepath?" you ask looking at Peter, the detail coming back to you suddenly. Was he reading your mind right now? It didn't feel like it. Back in the room you'd had a very distinct feeling of him reaching out to you, and you couldn't feel that at all.
Peter nods as he leads you out of the elevator and back into the building, heading in a different direction than you know. "Yep. I'm actually a bit of an oddity, because I'm unusually low on the generation/channeling scale for a T/T with the full set, just T-8," he says, taking you outside where it's just as beautiful as when you walked over.
"It's actually why I got into Talent Science. I wanted to learn more about why certain Talents seem to cluster, and why those clusters have a tendency towards certain regions of the G-C scale. Like telepaths are frequently only receiving or sending, but telekinetics who are also telepathic are disproportionately more likely to be able to both send and receive. Why does telepathy and generalized telekinesis seem to be so closely aligned, and why are so many of the strongest Talents are T/Ts and Elementals? Why are there so many more telekinetics and Elementals when it seems like it should be completely random?"
He shakes his head. "Maybe we'll even figure out where the heck the energy that's letting us do all of this is coming from and what lets us use it eventually," he says, and then blinks. "Ah, sorry. Didn't mean to get so technical."
It was… a bit over your head, to be honest. You can't really understand why someone would care so much about something like that. …But he seems happy?
"What are you guys interested in?" Nat asks.
"…I like reading," Angharad says. "It's like… going somewhere but not. …And I liked playing rugby, before I couldn't."
Could those things be any more different?
She looks down. "Explains why I was so good though," she mutters with a hint of frustration. "Knew it was too good to be true."
"Places!" you say, drawing everyone's attention to you and keeping Angie from getting too lost in her thoughts.
"…Places?" Nat repeats incredulously.
"Yep!" you confirm.
"Like traveling?" she asks.
You wobble your hand. "That counts, but also like, just exploring stuff and doing new things? Like this is."
"I can definitely see that," Peter says, laughing a little. "I don't think we've ever gotten the high school kids coming to the TSC on their own just for fun, especially before school's even started. We get some at the restaurants and dining spots on the weekends sometimes, but… never anything more than that, really."
Whaaaaaaat?
"But it's so cool over here!" There's so many buildings and so many places that probably have bunches of interesting things in them.
He laughs again. "Most of them are probably a bit intimidated. There are some freshman-senior relationships that keep dating and stuff, but yeah. We don't really see much of you guys, especially you freshmen," he says, leading you into a building.
The space you're in is pretty empty, there's only a couple other people, and at the far end is an open food-serving area and an actual ice cream place.
Oh you're so remembering this.
Peter leads the group over to the counter and you order, a guy coming out of the back room to serve you, and when you all have everything he and Peter go to the end of the counter to do something.
"Most of the campus dining stuff here is free, but places like this that are technically franchises aren't," Natalie says, noticing where you're looking, and then immediately continues when you freeze, eyes wide. "Don't feel guilty or anything. We actually have some pretty easy ways to get money—I've personally got licensed mod designs on the market—and there's not a ton to spend it on here. I know for a fact that Peter's more than happy to do this."
The young man in question comes back over to you, heading towards a table a bit to your right, and your group migrates that way to join him.
You all sit down, you taking your time to just enjoy the ice cream you got.
"So do you guys have any idea what you want to focus on in school?" Peter asks. "…Not that you have to. Jeez, I knew I had no idea what I wanted to do. But maybe you do?"
You turn to look at Angie, the other girl doing the exact same thing, before you both turn back to Peter and shake your heads.
He shrugs. "Worth a try, at least."
Nat looks at you two, resting her chin on an upturned palm. "How about we tell you about who's the best teachers then?" she offers, smirking.
The conversation turns into a series of stories from Peter and Natalie, what the school's like and roommates, teachers and craziness, and it sounds… fun.
It makes you feel less nervous about all of this. Better. If they could have that, then you can too.
And now… now you're actually kind of really looking forward to it all.
A/N: Sorry for the uh… month? of absence. I'm back. Writing the next segment (a little wandering + lunch), and that'll have the next vote in it.
Anyways, more Talent details, along with some decompression and ice cream therapy. Amy's feeling a bit better (both generally and her anxiety about school), though she's still a bit shaken by everything.
Peter and Dr. Liang are in the booth, looking at something below the window and gesturing.
"They're trying to figure out what happened, and if something went wrong," Nat says.
You shake your head. You know there was nothing wrong.
Natalie twists around, waving her arms and getting the attention of the two in the booth, and then motioning to come out.
They emerge a moment later, walking over to you.
"Are you okay? We were thinking about taking you to the medical center, but you seemed to be getting better on your own pretty quickly," Peter tells you. "Nat got you some water and that seemed to help, too."
You shake your head at the thought of ending up on a stretcher again. You've had enough of infirmaries for the next week.
"I'm fine," you tell them, and you aren't even sure if it's a lie or not. You'll hold your opinion.
Dr. Liang bites her lip and crosses her arms. "Can you tell us anything about what happened?"
"I wasn't ready for it," you say, and it's the truth. The worst part wasn't the nothingness, not… not really, it was how unprepared you were for it. That's what made it so shocking and terrifying. "It was… nothing. Literally, nothing," you tell them.
"I-I couldn't see, couldn't hear, couldn't taste, or smell, or touch. And I couldn't even feel myself."
That was probably the worst.
"What do you mean?" the professor asks. "Internal sensations? Like proprioception, pain, hunger, thirst, physical weariness?"
You nod.
She frowns. "That's… unusual."
"The only things I had were the direction and…" You blink. You hadn't even realized it, but… "The two objects."
"The 'two objects'?" Peter repeats.
You nod. "One is fifty-six million two hundred ninety-one thousand eight hundred six miles that way," you say, pointing nearly up but a little off. "The other is nine thousand four hundred eighty three miles that way." Your other hand points almost perfectly straight down but a few fractions of a degree off.
"Uh, Amy?" Angharad says, getting your attention.
"Yeah?"
"…That's the Sun. And Haeld."
…Oh. "Oh," you say dumbly. That would make sense. You let your hands drop. "Well then."
"Have you always been that precise with distances?" Dr. Liang asks.
You shake your head. "It's just those two things. I know where they are."
"Hmmm," she hums thoughtfully.
"Um. What did it look like out here?"
Angharad shakes her head slowly, her face slightly pale.
"It was pretty freaky. Really freaky," Nat says. "And I tried to cancel you, but it wouldn't work."
"Is there a video or something?" you ask.
The professor nods, and there's suddenly a visual ping as your runner has access to the file.
You open it, letting your runner open broadcast the program so the others can see it as well and it doesn't look like you're just playing with empty space.
It's actually a full holo, three dimensional and everything, but you adjust it so that you're looking at it from about the same view as the others would have.
You start it, and everything is still, you just see yourself sitting there. Nothing changes.
And then without warning you deform, everything about you compressing impossibly, your knees getting closer to your hips even when the wheelchair hasn't changed, your front getting smaller and sides becoming visible, looking like you're turning inside out before suddenly you're just not there.
What the hell.
There's nothing, and you fast-forward, holo-Natalie appearing in the room and becoming more and more stressed, pacing around, biting her knuckle, until you hit the eight minute mark, and you're suddenly there, filling out until everything settles back into place, the same as what you'd seen at the start, just in reverse.
You go back to the beginning, and adjust the view so that you're looking down at the room as a cube from the corner that's currently your upper left. The video plays out, and this time it's even more nauseating, the geometries impossible and just not making sense. You clearly don't move an inch, and your knees are at the front edge of the seat and your butt at the back, and the wheelchair doesn't change, and you know you're still taking up the same volume and distance, but somehow you appear to get thinner and thinner, the distances shortening, your body flattening and sides becoming visible, back somehow expanding to match the rest, until you can't get any more thin and just disappear.
You look up from the holo, everybody else staring at you. "That was…"
"Yeah," Peter agrees. "Like someone combined Escher and Dalí and decided you'd be the perfect way to bring it to life."
Greeaaaaat.
"The parts with you appearing and disappearing are slowed down by about twenty-five times," Dr. Liang tells you. "The room automatically moves to a much, much higher sample rate when it notices activity, but that's far too slow to really see what's happening and is only really useful for very detailed analysis."
It looked like it took about seven and a half seconds. Point seven five over two point five is… zero point three. That all happened in point three seconds.
You go back to the video and alter the speed of the segment that the professor was talking about to real-time, and then watch, and oh my god that's even worse.
It happens so fast that you don't get anything other of an extremely disturbing sense of utter wrongness and impossibility before it's gone, leaving you no time to process it, the vision of you turning inside out burned into your mind and playing over and over. The suddenness is even more jarring and shocking than the drawn-out version, and it make the entire event all that much worse.
And you weren't even turning that fast!
Ugh.
You rub the heel of your right hand against your forehead.
"I was… turning," you tell them. "That's all I really know. I turned, and then nothing. And I… I wasn't ready for it. It was nothing. So I turned back."
"Having adverse reactions to your own Talent is rare, but it does happen," Dr. Liang tells you. "Sometimes the person even rejects it completely."
You shake your head. That's not it. What you experienced was extremely unnerving and scary, but it was the shock and that you were caught so off guard that really made it as absolutely terrifying as it was. Now that you knew what it was like, you felt like it might not be so bad. Like watching a scary movie the first time versus the second time.
Besides, you're here to learn your Talent. It may be disturbing and unnatural and absolutely terrifying, but it's yours. It's yours, and it's not some useless little Talent. You can go away in less than a second, and that's not a small thing.
"No," you say with finality. You're not running away from this.
…But you also really don't want to try anything with it again right now.
The professor sighs. "Well, the good news is that what you did wasn't dangerous. Honestly, it's probably one of the tamer things I've seen come out of a Talent, considering I specialize in abnormal expressions. You're not doing anything to your environment, or to the people around you, just something to yourself. Of course, we also weren't getting any readings from the sensor ring after you disappeared, but until you did there wasn't anything out of the ordinary."
You nod.
"Since this is your first time, you probably don't have a good enough feel of yourself to be able to gestalt with anything yet, much less a Generator, so we can't evaluate your channeling. Or energy production."
You're pretty sure you're okay with that. "Do you… do you have any idea what it is?" you ask her. She's a researcher, right? If anyone should have an idea, it's her.
Unfortunately, it seems not, because she shakes her head. "Not the specifics, no. I can say with almost a hundred-percent certainty that it's a Warping ability, though. It's the only class you find Talents that mess with space like that. But I've never seen or heard about anything like what you did." She smiles. "So even if this didn't turn as happy as we hoped, I suppose I should be thanking you, it's not every day I get to see something completely new, especially something that dramatic or exciting. I might actually look into it some more, if you don't mind?"
You shake your head.
"I'm guessing you wouldn't be up for trying anything else today, either?" she asks, but sounding like she already knows the answer, and not minding.
"Sorry," you apologize quietly. You had really hoped you'd be able to get a lot out of this, too, or at least a clearer picture than you did.
"No. It's not anybody's fault," she tells you. "Can't help what you can't control."
That's fair, you think, though you're still a bit disappointed even with the memories of that place fresh in your mind.
"C'mon. How about Nat and I take you two out for ice cream or something?" Peter offers. "The place here on campus should be open, even if it's limited hours today."
You can't help but perk up a little at that. This was supposed to be an adventure today, and it's not even been three hours! And you did learn about your Talent, even if it wasn't all that great an experience, but it's enough to help you pick your classes now!
You look at Angie, and she nods a little, so you turn back to facing the older people. "Okay!"
He smiles. "Nat?"
The older girl shrugs. "Sure, I'd be up for it."
"Alright then," he says and moves to walk around you, you turning to follow as he walks towards the exit door. You hear footsteps behind you, so the other two must be following you.
At the door, Peter stops and turns around. "Thank you for helping us Dr. Liang!"
Oh! You swivel around to face the professor, who's at the other end of the room. "Yeah! Thanks!" you yell.
She just waves you off. "Of course!" she calls across the open space.
Peter leads you out the heavy door and back down the hallways to the elevator you'd come from.
"So, um, you're a telepath?" you ask looking at Peter, the detail coming back to you suddenly. Was he reading your mind right now? It didn't feel like it. Back in the room you'd had a very distinct feeling of him reaching out to you, and you couldn't feel that at all.
Peter nods as he leads you out of the elevator and back into the building, heading in a different direction than you know. "Yep. I'm actually a bit of an oddity, because I'm unusually low on the generation/channeling scale for a T/T with the full set, just T-8," he says, taking you outside where it's just as beautiful as when you walked over.
"It's actually why I got into Talent Science. I wanted to learn more about why certain Talents seem to cluster, and why those clusters have a tendency towards certain regions of the G-C scale. Like telepaths are frequently only receiving or sending, but telekinetics who are also telepathic are disproportionately more likely to be able to both send and receive. Why does telepathy and generalized telekinesis seem to be so closely aligned, and why are so many of the strongest Talents are T/Ts and Elementals? Why are there so many more telekinetics and Elementals when it seems like it should be completely random?"
He shakes his head. "Maybe we'll even figure out where the heck the energy that's letting us do all of this is coming from and what lets us use it eventually," he says, and then blinks. "Ah, sorry. Didn't mean to get so technical."
It was… a bit over your head, to be honest. You can't really understand why someone would care so much about something like that. …But he seems happy?
"What are you guys interested in?" Nat asks.
"…I like reading," Angharad says. "It's like… going somewhere but not. …And I liked playing rugby, before I couldn't."
Could those things be any more different?
She looks down. "Explains why I was so good though," she mutters with a hint of frustration. "Knew it was too good to be true."
"Places!" you say, drawing everyone's attention to you and keeping Angie from getting too lost in her thoughts.
"…Places?" Nat repeats incredulously.
"Yep!" you confirm.
"Like traveling?" she asks.
You wobble your hand. "That counts, but also like, just exploring stuff and doing new things? Like this is."
"I can definitely see that," Peter says, laughing a little. "I don't think we've ever gotten the high school kids coming to the TSC on their own just for fun, especially before school's even started. We get some at the restaurants and dining spots on the weekends sometimes, but… never anything more than that, really."
Whaaaaaaat?
"But it's so cool over here!" There's so many buildings and so many places that probably have bunches of interesting things in them.
He laughs again. "Most of them are probably a bit intimidated. There are some freshman-senior relationships that keep dating and stuff, but yeah. We don't really see much of you guys, especially you freshmen," he says, leading you into a building.
The space you're in is pretty empty, there's only a couple other people, and at the far end is an open food-serving area and an actual ice cream place.
Oh you're so remembering this.
Peter leads the group over to the counter and you order, a guy coming out of the back room to serve you, and when you all have everything he and Peter go to the end of the counter to do something.
"Most of the campus dining stuff here is free, but places like this that are technically franchises aren't," Natalie says, noticing where you're looking, and then immediately continues when you freeze, eyes wide. "Don't feel guilty or anything. We actually have some pretty easy ways to get money—I've personally got licensed mod designs on the market—and there's not a ton to spend it on here. I know for a fact that Peter's more than happy to do this."
The young man in question comes back over to you, heading towards a table a bit to your right, and your group migrates that way to join him.
You all sit down, you taking your time to just enjoy the ice cream you got.
"So do you guys have any idea what you want to focus on in school?" Peter asks. "…Not that you have to. Jeez, I knew I had no idea what I wanted to do. But maybe you do?"
You turn to look at Angie, the other girl doing the exact same thing, before you both turn back to Peter and shake your heads.
He shrugs. "Worth a try, at least."
Nat looks at you two, resting her chin on an upturned palm. "How about we tell you about who's the best teachers then?" she offers, smirking.
The conversation turns into a series of stories from Peter and Natalie, what the school's like and roommates, teachers and craziness, and it sounds… fun.
It makes you feel less nervous about all of this. Better. If they could have that, then you can too.
And now… now you're actually kind of really looking forward to it all.
A/N: Sorry for the uh… month? of absence. I'm back. Writing the next segment (a little wandering + lunch), and that'll have the next vote in it.
Anyways, more Talent details, along with some decompression and ice cream therapy. Amy's feeling a bit better (both generally and her anxiety about school), though she's still a bit shaken by everything.
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Huh, works on a larger scale than I though. Might need some practice to be able to detect planets... If we're detecting gravitic waves at all. Might be something else if all we're picking up are the stars.
I would assume there is some way to pick up planetary bodies if we have any form of teleportation, as we seem to since our character feels like she can move, and popping back into reality in the middle of space seems like a bad idea.
I wonder if the waves we're detecting are uniform, or at least consistent. Might be a good idea to pop in, detect a wave, and then pop out immediately as we feel the next one from the same star pass to get a good time scale for ourself in that other place.
Also, sideways to reality is a go it looks like. That's a fairly apt description for how someone stepping out of reality would look like I feel.
I would assume there is some way to pick up planetary bodies if we have any form of teleportation, as we seem to since our character feels like she can move, and popping back into reality in the middle of space seems like a bad idea.
I wonder if the waves we're detecting are uniform, or at least consistent. Might be a good idea to pop in, detect a wave, and then pop out immediately as we feel the next one from the same star pass to get a good time scale for ourself in that other place.
Also, sideways to reality is a go it looks like. That's a fairly apt description for how someone stepping out of reality would look like I feel.
I feel like she'll get back to it in a day or two. Normally I'd be worried about needing to hit that time between too soon and too late to get back into it, but she seems the type to jump back into it as soon as she's ready and, as she said, she loves Places.
... We had an entire discussion on the nature of our power and how it probably works over the last pages. We are so far past that kind of guess.
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- Location
- Maybe?
Hmm.
If that was a four-dimensional rotation, what was its axis?
What happens if we evert while on a moving vehicle? Does it lock to the closest center of significant gravity? Does momentum reset? It'd have to, otherwise we can trivially reach orbit if we just keep going while faced g-wards.
I wonder if we leave an anchor of some kind.
If that was a four-dimensional rotation, what was its axis?
What happens if we evert while on a moving vehicle? Does it lock to the closest center of significant gravity? Does momentum reset? It'd have to, otherwise we can trivially reach orbit if we just keep going while faced g-wards.
I wonder if we leave an anchor of some kind.
I'm not sure "but that would let us trivially reach orbit" is actually an argument we can't do it.
An argument that we shouldn't, maybe.
This doesn't really matter though? It was a forth dimensional rotation within what is a three dimensional reality. There really isn't difference in what spatial axis it was because it doesn't exist within their normal reality.
Also, it's kind of a misnomer? A 4th dimension just means there's a spatial dimension that's orthogonal to to our usual 3 dimensions. No matter which way you twist and turn it, they'll always be in the same direction/space relative to each other. Asking what axis she moved on is kind of liking asking which way is up. Or maybe left is a better example.
I'm not too sure about this question either. I mean, it may be relevant, but Amy says she feels like she can move in that space. Which considering we're working on the scale of stars being our navigation points it looks like, complaining we can trivially reach orbit seems... I don't know. Redundant almost?
I mean, there are points in the question that may be relevant. If we keep moving then do we reappear in normal reality out in space with no ship by accident? Or if we anchor to wherever we go in then what is it relative to? Actually that question answers itself. The planet rotates and moves, but we reappeared in the exact same spot we left, so we somehow anchor ourself in some relative space. I imagine the sensors would have detected if we'd reappeared above or to the side of our entry point with how fine they seemed to be, which is what would have happened to at least some small degree if we had purely conserved momentum. Although I'm not sure how far we would have moved in eight minutes.
Or at least I think it was eight minutes. Yes, it was.
Now we might have been anchored in a couple of different ways. The two possibilities that strike me first are we are just locked into a place, where we exit is where we will appear relative to our surroundings and space (presumably unless we Move somewhere else on purpose), or we are still under the affects of the acceleration of our surroundings, the planet's movement and rotation in this case. They're almost the exact same in practice, just using different mechanics. I think.
There may be more methods for this, as well as something completely alien from our (seemingly) 4th dimensional space.
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0th Law
The Promethean Rose
- Location
- 5 Minutes into the Future
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Considering the fact that we disappeared, we probably rotated so that the "face" we were showing to everyone was one in which humans are typically 0-dimensional, which is weird because it is (theoretically) impossible to exist in 3-dimensional space when one's length in one dimension is 0.
I think our general assumptions between the last two updates have been something along the lines that by rotating on a 4th dimension we can observe reality from... well outside reality. And tacking on this update it seems to imply cease to be observable in normal 3 dimensional space.
Using the picture Blaflaix posted near the top of this page we kind of are walking in the same plane that the rest of the figures are except whenever we want we can step off the side of the frame and walk down it, becoming unobservable to those in 3 dimensional space.
It's... hard to tell right now? The shoe just kind of fits. *Shrug* We'll be getting more evidence as we go. I mean we could be becoming a zero-dimensional entity for all we know, though this seems unlikely considering we can still observe space in at least three dimensions (we observed waves traveling through that space).
Of course my brain is saying if we're becoming a 0-dimensional entity along one of the 3 traditional axes of space to turn onto a forth one outside of reality that we should still be able to be observed along the two axes we are still sharing with normal 3 dimensional reality. On the other hand we're turning on an axis that basically doesn't exist in reality, so leaving normal observable reality altogether really doesn't seem like that much of a stretch.
This could also be a separate but intersecting 3 dimensional reality we're stepping into as well, something running parallel or perpendicular to the normal reality everyone lives in.
*Shrug* I have no clue. Go for the simplest answer/guess/hypothesis until you have evidence it's something else, so I'm going to stick to it being some 4th dimension we're turning upon that let's us observe 3 dimensional reality from "outside" until we learn more.
Interesting. The previous chapter is titled 90 degrees and in this chapter Amy mentions she turned back. I think she might have only performed a quarter rotation along whatever axis she used. Since her visibility went to zero in standard 3-D, It might be that it's a sinusoidal sort of thing and there's be something neat if she turned further.
Script Mak3r
(Verified Sun God) (Verified Feathers)
- Location
- Hell of Blazing Fires
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Something neat would happen, if turning into antimatter is neat.
- Location
- Maybe?
Oh oops. I completely missed that. Yeah, that ... that gives options.
Turning into antimatter is extremely neat.
I think there's two places to go from here. The sensible thing is slowly acclimate ourselves to that space, test what happens if somebody puts a thin surgical string where our skin would be when we evert, slowly get a better sense of surrounding gravitational objects (we shouuld be able to see that way, in principle).
The fun thing to do next is arrange for a spacesuit and a beacon and move "a decent distance upwards."
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- Location
- United States
Explosions are messy, not neat.