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not reached by the frost
Topaz finds herself in a very strange place
Permalink Mark Unread

A new candidate has been chosen. The magic examines their surroundings and tries to construct a suitable starting point.

Most of the structures around the candidate are made of rectangular prisms so their introductory room will be one of those. They tend to sleep on somewhat rounded rectangular prisms so it makes one of those too. Layers of fabric are arranged to build on that familiarity. Other furnishings are similarly loosely copied a desk, a couple chairs appropriately proportioned to the candidate's body.

Oh and the candidate and the others of their species seem to wear coverings most of the time. The precise details are too varied to extrapolate useful patterns so it just makes copies of all the coverings they've used in the last week and places them in a few bins to one side of the room. It does understand enough to clean and repair them so it does that.

With those basics handled it busies itself with tweaks to the other nearby parts of it's realm to provide for the candidates needs and then it waits for them to sleep.

Once they're deeply asleep it pulls them into itself and nestles them under the covers of the bed it prepared.

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She blinks herself awake slowly, stretching out beneath the sheets. They feel a lot lighter then she remembered...

She opens her eyes, and yep okay this is in fact not Kansas any more. 

She hops out of bed, and takes a quick look around. Is there anything on the desk? What's the door situation? 

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There's are in fact two doors on opposite sides of the room. There's also shutters on one wall which may or may not be an especially weird door given how far they are off the ground (three feet.)

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She blinks her eyes slowly and steadily, then picks the door on the left to knock on. Can't be too too careful, here, and if they're willing to abduct? her than it's not too unlikely they're willing to shoot first and ask questions later, if that's even what's going on. 

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Nothing happens after she knocks on the door. It has a normal looking door handle, like one she'd see in an office building or a newer restaurant. Above the door handle there's what looks like a deadbolt turn and it seems like it might be in the locked position.

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And... the other door? 

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The situation with the other door is the same. It has a handle she could try if she wanted but nobody will answer to knocking.

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She tentatively pokes the door handle, then if that's all good she slowly tries the open it - no sudden movements here. 

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The door opens easily. This room beyond if room is even the right word for it is in a word incongruous. It's triangular with a three story high ceiling. There's a pool or maybe a small pond filling the center of the room it's loosely circular and around ten meters across. The water is perfectly still and silent. That's somewhat normal, the stranger parts of the room are the mirrors entirely covering each of the three walls excepting the door and the pockets and sheets of what might be water and other colored liquids just floating around the edges of the pool.

In one of the near corners there's also something that's loosely recognizable as a toilet though made from wood rather than the ceramic she's probably more used to.

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That... is pretty bizarre. It's not like she hasn't seen angular roofs that shape a building, but the level of commitment is... impressive.

 Her brow furrows a little as she looks around. Does the pool or bathroom smell like anything? Are there any more doors here? 

 

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There aren't more doors leading outward. The smell is faintly naturey like the smell of a grassy field or a smoothly flowing stream.

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Hopefully that doesn't mean it's full of algae if she's going to have stick around here? 

She doesn't have to use the bathroom quite yet, so... 

Back out into the room to try the other door? 

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It is as it turns out locked but she can easily unlock it and open the door. The door opens out of a tree trunk and into a forest. The tree trunk is clearly not big enough to hold the room she was just in let alone the bathroom.

Also forest is underselling the weirdness the trees have red bark, but redish brown but bright red like fall leaves. Speaking of the leaves they're a shade of teal. There's some fairly clear paths leading into the forest but no clearly visible destinations.

Scattered among the leaves there are large and small fruits in a variety of colors, none of them are familiar enough for her to guess whether they're safe to eat though.

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She steps out tentatively. 

Red barked trees aren't the oddest thing - it wouldn't be the sort of thing that would make her question reality on its own, but...

She glances back at tree she seemingly came out of. That doesn't seem particularly natural or physicalist. She juants over to the side of the tree, just to double check that there's no clever optical trick hiding the rest of the width of the building.  

How bright out is it? Are the paths different in any way from each other?

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They paths are marked by little stones of different colors from where she's standing she can see stones in a deep purple, a brighter red than the bark, sky blue, a dark green and a bright yellow.

Nothing seems to respond to her stepping out. The light is filtered through the canopy but the sky above seems fairly bright.

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Something to think on. 

She pops back into the room - somehow it has her clothes in it? things haven't really stopped being bizzare since she got here, but the amount of care in making a homebase for her wherever here is worth noting. 

Is there anything beneath the bed, on inside the desk, below her clothes, anything like that? Her best guess is that this is some sort of - survivalist prank thing, so she might as well poke around everything like she's in a text adventure adventure game. She takes a look over them too - any obvious 'puzzle' features, or the like? 

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There doesn't seem to be anything under the bed in fact the stand the bed is on is flush with the floor rather than hollow. 

Her clothes are a jumbled mess including shoes but otherwise they're all things she's very familiar with.

The desk has some notebooks and pens on the inside but the strange designs on the surface might be worth noting with an adventure game mindset. So too might the designs in the same style at a few places along the wall.

There's a strong circle motif with other symbols scribed within the circles, the one in the middle of the desk is pretty complicated looking and it has a few circles nested inside it. On the left of the desk it's simpler at first glance but on a closer inspection that filled in circle is a dense block of symbols. And on the right of the desk is an actually simple design.

There's a couple repeats of that simple design on the wall and another complicated design on each of the clothing bins. And a final complicated looking design at another point on the wall.

And there's still the shutters that she hasn't opened.

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She flips through the notebook - anything in them? 

She feels a little silly trying this but... she tears out one of the pieces of paper in the notebook and sees if she can traces the design on the middle desk, then scribbles in some of the simpler designs for later reference. 

Oh, shoes and socks are good! She puts on some nice light blue ones and her creaky sneakers. 

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The notebooks are empty and the pens and pencils are pretty normal. Tracing the middle design will take a few minutes but it's certainly doable. After she finishes, a sort of mental screen pops up, it appears to be in her field of view but it's also not blocking her view of anything else. For now it just contains a copy of the design she just traced.

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...Okay???

She laughs faintly. That's incredible, honestly. It really looked like another world already but this...

A little grin pops up on her lips for a moment. 

She hesitantly pokes a finger at the screen.

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The screen persists as long as she keeps touching the circle. As for her finger there's a feeling a little like touching water but also with no real resistance as she touches the screen.

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Hmmmmmm. 

This is silly but can she - pinch to zoom?

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She can.

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Oo interesting. 

...Can she just zoom without pinching, by thinking at it? 

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It takes the right mental motion but she can get it after a few tries. It's roughly the difference between thinking of moving your hand and actually moving it.

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Can she copy-paste?

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She can make a second copy of this circle but not a third.

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She blink blinks. 

Can she... 'open a new tab'? 

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She cannot.

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She hesistantly pokes the design on the left of the desk. Can she open the window for that?  

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This circle summons a new smaller window with pictures of the notebooks and pens she found in the drawers.

There's a faint sense that this is connected to something bigger.

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Oo? 

Is it a static image or something more dynamic? Can she paste the sigil into this window? 

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As it turns out they are 3D models and she can rotate them to look at them from any angle.

This window does not accept an attempt to make a sigil appear inside it.

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She pouts. 

There goes that plan. 

She fumbles around looking to see if there's some sort of 'print' command. 

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She wants to print this pen? Yes she can do that. She can feel the command be accepted but nothing immediately visible happens.

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She tries to print the pen and there's just sort of an impression of something meaningful happening? Weird. 

She opens back up the sigil page, and tries to see if it gets a different result when she tries to print that. 

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Upon reopening the sigil page she might be surprised to note that it also has a copy of the one from the left side of the desk and likely even more surprised to notice that it's already three dimensional dipping deeper into what would be the desk below the main circle.

If she tries to copy this new array though it fails in the same way. She can treat the previous array as a three dimensional object if she prefers including viewing it from weirder angles that demonstrate it does have thickness but that doesn't help her with copying it to the printer screen either.

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She hums. 

In lieu of anything to obviously better to do, she runs around and taps all of the sigils around the room - does anything happen there? 

...Can she make a text box, or anything like that? 

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One of them seems to control the color and intensity of the lights in the room. There's actually several copies of that one including the one on the desk and one on a table next to the bed. The ones on the bins of clothing seem to have a sort of mental button she can press but she can't tell what it does she presses it. The big one on the wall seems to show her a map of the places she's been.

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Oh cute! Does seem nice and homey, to have all that control. 

She empties a bin of clothing, steps away, then presses the button. 

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There's a faint bit of feedback. It feels empty.

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She tentatively tosses in a shirt and tries again? 

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The emptiness feedback is gone. There's a brief sensation a bit like an impression of thinking and then a sense of completion.

Nothing visible seems to have happened to the shirt.

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She glances along the interface again - has anything changed around the clothing bins? 

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No, to the extent that she could follow it the sensation of this circle seemed focused on the bin it's carved into. And nothing happens to contradict that sensation.