Xsaieta @ Salme

Hi, there!

You strike me as the sort of person who’d want to know when you’re being observed from afar.

I’m willing to bet a shiny Lucre that a piece of jewelry that used to belong to me found its way to the piece you recently received. I’m overjoyed that it’s yours now! It served me well but it deserves to go on adventures.

I doubt it’ll have anything mystical for you, but know that you’re carrying around something that helped me protect my friends and kick some ass, back in the day, which is its own kind of magic. Also, the new setting for it sounds really really pretty!

Good hunting.

• Yima Xsaieta

Well, you know, there’s a lot of distant observation going on in this world (we’ve got voyeur constellations and Angels with uninhibited access to logs) so I’m kind of used to just assuming I’m being watched, but yes, actually being informed is. Really nice.

Oh! That’s amazing that it was yours. I … you know, I don’t have much jewelry and where I’m from having metal jewelry is pretty special, let alone something set with otherworldy materials. I’m glad I get to carry forward something that went on adventures with you. Having that kind of history is its own kind of magic.

And the mystery of unraveling the jewelry thing made Jorule more animated than I’ve seen him since we met, really, so thanks for that.

Nice to meet you, Yima Xsaieta. If you ever want to chat I’m around.

Stings & Kills told me I should talk to you about how to stare at the sun in detail? (Important note: sun is especially angry and can only harm and may not be a sun at all?)

Ooh, elaborate? If they pointed you in my direction it must be a really spicy problem, I love spicy problems.

In general though there are two ways to safely take a close-up picture of a star. You can’t just use a telescope, because anything that focuses a sun’s light if it’s that close and that bright turns into - have you ever used a magnifying glass and tin foil to cook a hot dog? Does that even work where you’re from? Do they even have hot dogs? Okay, ignore most of that.

If you point a magnifying device at the sun, what you have made is a death laser. This is true even for normal suns, let alone suns that are especially angry and want to kill you particularly.

If there’s anything that you can use to filter the sun’s light, putting that over the aperture - not the observation lens, the aperture, the first lens that light passes through - can help. For a normal sun this can look like a very very dark, almost opaque piece of glass that’s silvered on one side like a mirror with silver or gold. In your case you might have to resort to more esoteric materials, perhaps. Without being there I’m not sure what you’ve got available or what their properties are. Then, you can shape a prism in a special way that will redirect most of the energy coming in to the magnifying device away from the actual optics of the device.

That SHOULD leave you with an attenuated-enough signal/image that you can magnify it safely.

Once you magnify it, you’ll want some way of indirectly observing it. Project the image onto something else that can hold an image, expose the system to the sun you’re trying to get a picture of for as long as it takes for the image to resolve without cooking the hell out of your optics train, and then cap the aperture and look at your pretty picture. I can make a kind of special paper that can do this but I don’t have a way of getting any to you safely - look around and see if you can find anything locally that you think would do the trick.

I wanted to thank you for these instructions, Xsaieta. I passed them on to one of my partners, and he … massively expanded on it, but kept the same principles, and we were able to get a very, very, very interesting set of images concerning the sun, which is, as Stings-and-Kills suspected, not a sun at all.

It’s a corpse—something dead, reliving its own death again and again in perpetuity, throwing off so much gnosis (my world’s version of … mana?) that it’s almost unbelievable. Despite everything, we couldn’t quite tell whether it was dead or what it even was—just that it had something that looked like wings and had been ripped apart. Which is obviously not your problem to solve, but it is an intensely spicy one, and I thought you might appreciate hearing about it.

Man, that’s fucked up! And really interesting! A lot of things that are one of those are also the other one, I think. Huh.

Glad to hear that it worked, though! I’d love to see the specifications on what actually did get built out of sheer personal curiosity, it sounds like it was really fucking impressive work. Clearly your taste in people is as good as or better than your taste in jewelry!