pumpkin princess

[imeanforever]

Promise settles in. Her garden grows. Her tree grows; she stores her map and the rest of the notebook in there, first, and after she's been there for seven days, she can fit inside it herself. (At that early stage it's only an improvement over the outdoors when it's raining, but it's her tree. It'll get bigger.) She slowly broadens her diet as she learns the peculiar local plants and which ones she likes. She coaxes her tree into flower, picks one and ensorcels it, wraps cottony fluff from one of her trees in a giant flower petal of the same kind her bag is made of, and she has a pillow. The other flowers turn into haw berries that taste like home. She practices fairylights and then more complicated spells all around her new turf with her map, then without, until she has it memorized by feel and by the response of the magic when she casts.

When she doesn't need to do magic to her plants every single day to get and keep them producing at a rate sufficient to sustain her, she goes to the library and tells them things about the continent she came from in exchange for a half-century's membership. She brings home books. She makes paper to take notes on.

She doesn't have any near neighbors, but she has distant ones, and she trades foreign seeds and candied dewdrops for glass and books. She drinks her stream and writes her thoughts (a lot of her thoughts are about Arcane). She decompresses. She reads and thinks.

Time goes by. It's dark at night; sometimes she watches the stars.

Comments

[imeanforever]

"It took me weeks to learn to make one when that was nearly the only thing I did with my time."

[infinitely_stranger]

"Interestingly tricky, like I said."

[imeanforever]

"And then it took a long time to settle, which I'm guessing isn't usually a problem you'd have if you made them."

[infinitely_stranger]

...He giggles.

"Not really, no."

[imeanforever]

"I tried to put it at a spot that would work well with it, since I had my pick, but no."

[infinitely_stranger]

"Not having a harmonic sense sounds so inconvenient."

[imeanforever]

"It really is! Although I wonder if it wouldn't get overwhelming at times?"

[infinitely_stranger]

"The harmonic noise in the mortal world was certainly... something. I wouldn't want to step through a gate without an extremely good reason."

[imeanforever]

"How good's your range? You drew me a map all the way to the edges of the paper without having to get up and move, so I assume it's broader than that indicates."

[infinitely_stranger]

"Oh - suppose that you could see sound as well as hear it," he says. "The spot where you're standing is obviously the clearest, but you can tell what's going on nearby without much trouble; then as you get farther away, the nearer sounds obscure the farther ones until it's all just a muddle. It's somewhat like that. If I'm somewhere harmonically quiet I can see a long way, but the more noise there is, the harder it is to see past it. It has gotten considerably easier with practice, though, which is how I managed to pick out this tangle while sitting down. When I was one or two centuries old, I would've had to fly in circles for an hour to get it all, especially with that cliff in the way."

[imeanforever]

Nod nod. "Is it directional?"

[infinitely_stranger]

He shakes his head.

[imeanforever]

"Interfered with by harmonically neutral solid objects?"

[infinitely_stranger]

"Only slightly. I have a hard time drawing maps of underground harmonics, but mostly because I can't visually see through rock, so I have less information available for estimating distances and picking landmarks."

[imeanforever]

"Oh, that makes sense. But you can sense them through, say, trees. And I guess harmonically complex objects like my tree are about the same as things like naturally-occurring tangles and cliffs?"

[infinitely_stranger]

"About the same, yes. They're often more interesting, though. A leaflet's tree has a certain kind of pattern, and a floating island has an entirely different one, and the Sapphire and Emerald Seas each have a very subtle pattern of their own that tangle up at the border."

[imeanforever]

Promise strokes her tree's bark. "I'm so glad I have my tree back."

[infinitely_stranger]

"It's a very nice tree."

[imeanforever]

"Do you want to see the spare room?"

[infinitely_stranger]

"Sure."

[imeanforever]

Promise shows him in. There is a small collection of books, carefully curated, on a shelf; she has accumulated a water basin and dishes and window glass and cushions for the benches around her eating nook. There is room to fly up to the next level, which is split into two rooms, each containing a bed and a nightstand and a chair; hers is obviously the one on the left and she's been using the spare to store her sewing, which she nips in to retrieve and stash in her own room.

[infinitely_stranger]

"Very cozy," says Arcane. "As houses go, it's a legitimately pleasant one."

[imeanforever]

"The original was smaller, I didn't know how to rapid-grow things back then."

[infinitely_stranger]

"You did very nicely with the design."

[imeanforever]

"Thanks."