It has never done anything wrong. In fact, none of the air in the patch has, even when it has been in other patches. It's so innocent.
A small human appears out of nowhere in the innocent patch of empty air.
She is wearing a many-pocketed black coat over an outfit that is mostly white with silver accents. On her head there perches a silver-accented white tiara, strangely stubborn about staying in place. She is also wearing a backpack, and a pair of wings resembling the gnarled branches of an ancient tree, strung with cobwebs that catch the air with improbable efficiency.
She can see land over thataway, but when she tries to move towards it, she discovers that her wings aren't rated for downless maneuvering. All she manages to do is set herself spinning vertiginously. She flails in a mostly-unsuccessful attempt to stabilize herself, and yells things that might mar the air's innocence.
Most of the things she tries don't work. She hopes she hasn't moved away from solid ground much, but it's hard to tell for sure just by looking. Still, better to experiment and learn even if she screws up in the process, rather than just sit still and hope for rescue.
Several times she has to take a long break. All this spinning isn't doing her stomach any good and she'd really rather not find out what happens when you throw up without gravity, especially not while she's still unable to escape the consequences. So to speak.
Since there seems to be a language barrier, she demonstrates her stuckness by trying and failing to move purposefully in the air. And now she's spinning again. At least she's figured out how to stop that in relatively short order - spread her wings out wide to create drag, make small adjustments until she slows down. But her poor stomach is distinctly ungrateful for the commotion.
The ears are a bit odd, but she's not about to stare. That would be rude.
She spreads her wings and flaps them tentatively.
<It seems like they're functioning normally now that there's a down again. I think that's the problem they were having before. Sure, let's fly, flying is more fun and generally faster.> And she takes off, flapping her inexplicably lift-generating cobwebs.
Eventually he sets down at a house with plants on the roof. It sits in what looks like a park, or an ex-park, although there are the beginnings of more houses being constructed in a ring that will have the plant-roofed house as a part of it.
And then, simultaneously (well, mostly, he hasn't practiced this very much) sending Sable a non-linguistic translation, he says, "Mom, I went to the edge of the planet and someone was stuck in the part without any down magic, and I towed her out, and she says she's from another world."
Silver-haired lady (who doesn't look anything like Mallyn or either of the girls, but does very slightly resemble her redheaded baby) turns around, blinking.
And they're all real people. She can tell. In fact they are alive to kind of an astonishing degree, the silver-haired woman and the two small girls. She's glad of her Terrarian enhancements, or she'd probably have to close down her groundsense to get away from all that aliveness.
"The world I'm from doesn't have a name I know of, but the world I was just in is called Terraria," she says. "That's where all of my stuff is from. Like these wings for example." She opens her wings illustratively, careful to keep them relatively close so as not to bump into anything, and then folds them down again. "Unfortunately for me, they don't work very well without a down."
"I think she will not insist on eating beans," she says.
What she puts down on paper is:
It's me, Sable. I'm alive and okay. I've been in a very weird world, and now I'm in a different, also very weird world with some people who can do things like send you this letter. The little girl sitting next to me says that her family will have you over for dinner 'as long as you don't want to eat beans'.
Because she definitely needs to add:
The first weird world (it's called Terraria) was unpleasant and full of nasty monsters, but apart from those it also had all sorts of marvellously useful things, and I brought lots. Examples include: a pair of wings that you can put on and take off and fly with; candy that makes you permanently healthier; a bow that shoots dragons.
"...Um, when you shoot an arrow with it the arrow turns into a huge snaky ghost dragon thing that is extremely on fire. I'm not going to demonstrate anywhere near your house. But they're good for when I'm surrounded by dangerous monsters and want to stop being surrounded by dangerous monsters very quickly."
She finishes her letter with:
Sorry it took me so long.
Love,
Sable
"...No," she says. "Uh, a stack of dirt looks like this."
She digs in one of the many pockets of her coat and comes up with a little brown cube, about an inch on a side. It seems plausibly made of compressed dirt.
"It's magic. Terrarian magic. This cube is made of nine hundred and ninety-nine much bigger cubes of dirt; that's why it's called a stack. I'd rather not demonstrate inside the house, though, I think you probably don't want large cubes of dirt in the middle of your floor even if I can clean them up afterward."
Dinner is delicious and non-Terrarian.
"Anyway, for you to go home too there are a few things to try. What eventually worked for Rhysel - she's the sister-in-law I mentioned - was resetting her home world to Elcenia so that she could be sent to Barashi. Also, since then some better wizards than I have worked on and implemented something called a summoning circle, which is an area where if you walk onto it you'll be sent to the other end. I'm not sure that either of these will work with whatever you did to get here, or whatever happened to put you in Terraria, but they're things to try - except I can't make a summoning circle myself."
"Okay," says Sable. "...It would be really, really useful to be able to get back to Terraria if I could be sure of getting home again from there... it's a dangerous place, but there's a lot of useful magic there. It seems like you have a lot of useful magic here too, but it does different things."
"Okay, good," she says. "...If there are other people who want to go to Terraria and get useful magic things, I guess I can't stop them, but it's really dangerous there and I don't want anybody to get hurt. I guess if somebody really wants to I could go with them or something. If I can be moved around normally."
"Lots of horrible monsters that try to kill people. Lots and lots and lots of horrible monsters that try to kill people. Some of them can float through walls or teleport or do all kinds of other weird things. They appear out of nowhere when there's a person nearby, and some of them disappear again if you run away far enough but some of them just keep chasing you."
"Oh. Well, maybe that too. But I don't think I'd ask somebody to come with me if they didn't want to anyway. It's really dangerous, and I know it well enough that most of its dangerous stuff isn't a big problem for me, but somebody else even with useful magic powers might get in trouble because they didn't know about all the kinds of monsters and their weird magic."
"Well - within the scope of purely Elcenian magic, living things have a home world. A summoning spell pulls something whose home world is not Elcenia into Elcenia, and then lets it snap back where it belongs when the spell is reversed. A sending spell pushes something whose home world is Elcenia somewhere else, and then lets it return when the spell is reversed. Right now, you aren't Elcenian - unless something you did or something that happened to you changed that when you got here - so I can't send you, but you aren't under a wizard's summoning spell, so you can't snap back where you came from. But if I cast this spell and it works for you the same way it did for Rhysel, then you'll be Elcenian in a sort of magical sense and I'll be able to send you."
"That makes sense. Now that I've thought of weird things going wrong, I'm probably going to be kind of nervous about them until that gets figured out... you could talk to Rhysel tomorrow, maybe? If you don't mind me staying in your guest room a little longer than might be strictly necessary?"
Even though a part of her thinks this is very silly, she sleeps in her armour. Something about being in a different strange world, or a house she didn't build herself, or having other people around—she can't convince herself to change into something cozier and less damage-reducing. It's pretty comfortable armour, though, so she gets to sleep okay.
<I had a lot to eat but it was mostly a lot of all the same things,> she explains. <Rabbit. Duck. Blueberries. A few kinds of mushroom. Several kinds of fish. So it's nice to have something that isn't any of the same few things I've been eating for ten years. And your mom makes nice food.>
"Oh, all right," says Ehail, laughing softly, and then she kisses each of her nieces on the forehead, hands Sable the plate, and holds out her hand for Sable's free one so she can teleport them back.
"I will work on a more developed version of the analysis," Aar Camlenn says, "and let you know when I have something."
"Thank you."
"I ran out of the really pretty ones!" says Rithka. "I want to go to work with Daddy again and make things."
"He'll give you stuff to make things with even if I don't make you beads," Mallyn says.
"Which ones do you want beads of?"
She picks up a vial of pale sparkling blue liquid and turns a little-boxful of beads pale blue and sparkly. They're very pretty - the pale blue is swirled with darker streaks, and the sparkle effect is made of little magical glints that fade in and out.
"That one is called Stardust," says Sable.
Nebula is a deep magenta with dots of white streaking across it like tiny shooting stars. The dots always travel upward, no matter the orientation of the surface.
Vortex is a dark green with paler streaks that always seem to swirl toward the center of the object no matter how you turn it.
Solar is a shiny, vivid orange-yellow with a faint pulsing glow.
And finally, 'Celestial' is a combination of all four: the background fades slowly from green to blue to purple to blue to green to yellow, glowing faintly all the while, and tiny points of light fade in and out as they chase each other across its surface in a slow whirling dance. It's a bit much, but in a pretty way.
Waves of intense colour sweep across a dark surface.
Sable dyes the remaining six boxes of beads in interesting named colours:
Shifting Sands is a shimmery pale yellow with a fast-moving pattern of lighter and darker sparkles.
Shifting Pearlsands is the same thing but slower, and pink with blue undertones.
Twilight is a dark, dark purple with a moving pattern of dim clouds and occasional bright starry sparkles. The whole boxful of beads presents a unified pattern; the violet-white stars seem to dance from bead to bead, darting between the drifting clouds.
Hades is a few shades darker than Stardust, and surrounds each bead in translucent ghostly white flames that entirely decline to catch on anything.
Living Ocean is a dark blue with slow waves of lighter blues and blue-greens.
Phase is dark grey with a fast-moving pattern of purple streaks that zoom all the way off the object's surface and keep going a little before fading out completely. Like Nebula's dots, they always travel up.
Blue Acid and Red Acid have a slow shifting light/dark pattern that moves outward from their apparent center in expanding circles; Pink Gel and Gel (which is dark blue) have a slow 'falling' gradient effect that seems to drip illusory colour onto whatever is beneath them, but doesn't actually stain the mugs; and Wisp turns the beads a bright, pale, faintly translucent turquoise that glows just the tiniest bit.
Well, anyway.
Reflective turns the beads into tiny round mirrors that catch the light prettily. Purple Ooze is purple and oozy; its light/dark gradient effect moves in slow, slow arcs. Negative has an interesting effect on the transparent glass beads: now they seem to show a skewed version of whatever colours are behind them, turning light to dark and dark to light and green to purple. Living Rainbow is a more muted version of Midnight Rainbow, one colour flowing into another without any background in between. Shadowflame Hades is like Hades but bright violet. Shadow turns beads into little blots of perfect dark...
"Do you want any of this?" wonders Sable, pulling out a vial with a strangely jittery effect. "I brought it along for completeness' sake, but it hurts my eyes to look at it too long."
There are a few more colour variants of things she's already used, including an entire series of Reflectives - Copper, Silver, Gold, Obsidian (which is a dark shiny purple-black that only reflects faint hints of its surroundings), and a generic 'Metal' that looks most like black iron.
She takes the scale and the vial and sits and stares at the gently blooping tubes.
"I think even those might turn out a little bit different. The Reflective Metal Dye doesn't match your hair just so, but the Jet Dragonscale Dye - that's what it called itself - turned out exactly like the scale. I think if I made a Gold Dragonscale Dye it would look more like a gold dragon and less like a shiny gold-coloured mirror."
"It's okay, I can still dye stuff for you," says Sable. She starts putting bottles neatly back into her dye box. The thwarted bowl gets one of the split colours, and at first it looks like they were all dyed plain brown, but she stirs her hand through the beads and it turns out that each one was dyed so that exactly its top half became brown and exactly its bottom half became silver, whichever orientation it happened to be in at the time.
She tries a more complicated split colour - "this one's called 'Blue Flame and Black'" - and it does the same thing, colouring the top halves of the beads in a pretty blue-turquoise gradient and the bottom halves in plain black. And now they are running very short on bowls.
The sorter plus the little boxes have plenty of room for beads, but— "I think maybe I should make another batch if we want to do all the rest of the colours," says Sable. "There's hardly any left, even though there were so many to start. I just hope I can get them to all land in the big box this time."
So many beads. But at least they land neatly in the box and don't spill all over the ground this time.
Then she starts piling beads into the sorter's remaining compartments and dyeing them, in splits and gradients and the few remaining Weird Colours.
"I'd have to go back to Terraria to get another full set to leave with you - I didn't pack spares of every single thing," says Sable. "But Rithka tried using them and it didn't work. I think you'd have to go to Terraria if you wanted to be able to dye things with them. And I don't know exactly what kind of going to Terraria would make you properly Terrarian enough to use the dyes."