ꙮ The Observatory, within the Liminal Library. You can see some of the stars, overhead, through the telescope’s aiming frustum, like there’s no glass there at all, nothing actually separating you from the darkness into which the telescope peers. There must be something there, perfectly and beautifully transparent. Starlight and gnosis-lamplight both shine on you, here.
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#awoken
#saint
is dressed in his desert gear, goggles raised onto his forehead. He stands, cross armed, staring up out into space.
: “Here, on Mu, we are granted a tremendous opportunity.”
, who was looking through the lens of the telescope just for the joy of looking at the stars, pulls away and glances at him. “Hm?”
: “Though we are unable to find Mu through our combined senses, we can now add another aspect to search by.”
: “The plan!” He dramatically whips an arm out to the side.
: “To send a scout up from the surface of Mu. Shielded with liminal gnosis, it will seek to escape the world.”
: “With one powering it, the other at the scope, and our minds oh-so-salaciously entwined…” He moves to brush hair out from in front of his face. “-there must be something we can experience regarding its location.”
nods, and grins at him. “And you can also—well. I wouldn’t recommend staring into the sun, but you can try to find where I am while you’re standing on Mu. Even if it’s just the direction.”
nods. “Any hint’s a big one!” He lightly skips towards her, and raises both his hands, palms forward, out to her.
doesn’t need to touch him to initiate the link, but she likes touching him, and so she twines her hands with his, and at the same time her mind with his. She doesn’t need to invite him in, because he lives there, in her heart, with her every breath.
- Salme used their techné Methexis (Salme has recreated the Ancient technique by which they can link their mind and experiences with that of another person and can do so effortlessly with a willing participant.)
ꙮ She doesn’t need to, but it helps. To hold his hand, and feel your own. To hold her hand, and feel your own.
also likes touching her, and as their minds link, he links his lips with hers, as a completely neccessary part of the techne. Or, well, as he sees it.
kisses him back easily, with a smile. It’s only necessary when linking with him, of course. Strange how that works.
’s determined eyes open, fondly gazing into hers. “See you in the stars, sweet sparrow.”
can’t help the flush those words elicit, and he knows the effect they’ve had—giddiness, and fondness, and something else she can’t quite articulate, but feels very strongly. “See you in the stars,” she says quietly, and then goes to sit at the telescope again.
ꙮ Are the stars somehow more lovely now, than they were before?
turns on a heel and jogs for the exit to the library- which deposits him into their room at the sietch, and from there it’s a manner of traversing the tunnel system up, up, up and out to the surface.
doesn’t know if the stars are more lovely, but having seen them every day from the Beast, she’s missed them on Mu.
ꙮ Gate Three’s close, and it’s the one you’d be heading towards anyways - there’s high ground.
dons his goggles and pulls up his hood before breaking through the mouth of the cave, and immediately wheels back around to clamber up the rocky cover that is the cave mouth. He ascends a bit, looking for the flat place he found earlier. There’s a sheet there, which he whips away to reveal what he’d placed there earlier- a scout-fiend, with undercarriage gnosis thrusters and a refractive, glass core. He owes Ari and the crew another one for that.
’At least there’s no shortage of sand here,’ she thinks through the link while admiring the fiend.
ꙮ A little black orb of tenebrous gnosis, curled up with potential inside the glass, so you can call the whole thing back– it should work, at any rate. You’re pretty sure it’ll work.
cracks his knuckles and takes a swig of water, sloshing it around in his mouth, not immediately swallowing. He extends a hand, weaving a stream of pellucid gnosis into the body of the fiend, which begins to power the thrusters. His other hand grasps at nothingness with waving fingers. Liminal gnosis begins to ricochet around the glass, and refracts in every direction, cloaking the fiend in an opaque field of dark violet gnosis.
ꙮ Facets and refractions of the space behind it, when you look directly at it, and a bright blue glow around the edges.
: “Blast off!” He plants both feet, and draws from deep within himself- he remembers having a million hands, two million eyes, when in methexis with Salme and Algol- understanding himself to be far more than a heart, a brain, a handsome face. His curiosity is the thrust, his determination is the shield, his will to overcome is the signal. The scout must ascend and escape as fast as possible- to fully resist Mu’s Sun is no small feat, especially when drawing closer to it. Salme’s link to him is the sole tether that escapes his form, everything else is concentrated into this launch.
ꙮ And he punches up, into the air, and the scout soars with a careening, dopplering happy little warble - and he cannot follow it, not precisely, not like he and Salme follow each others’ thoughts and beings, but he feels the intense energy of the Sun on it– passing around it, passing through it, just as he’d planned it to!
keeps her eye set to the telescope. She has it trained on the emptiness that Almachadta and the Beast orbit, though she’s not certain that’s correct. It’s just a starting point.
ꙮ Salme, Awoken, give me Pellucid, combined DC 4?
- The Awoken Prince invoked their 🔵pellucid gnosis [d4] -> 2.
- Salme invoked their 🔵pellucid gnosis [d6] -> 4.
ꙮ Salme experiences something utterly baffling, as the scout clears the interference of the Sun’s light – but she’s able to pinpoint it herself, and the Awoken understands what she understands:
ꙮ The signal from the Awoken’s scout is– not detectable, no, but she can still feel it, from the centre around which the Beast and Almachadta orbit, but she can also absolutely detect it, suffusing the space around her– not her, specifically, not the Observatory or even the Library per se, but still, she’s soaking in it.
reaches out. There is a ball of tenebrous gnosis inside the scout, and that gnosis is him and she knows him, is him as well as herself in this moment. She reaches for a sense of it, in one of the nine directions. Is it any specific place around her, or from the black hole?
ꙮ The signal is coming from both the black hole, and - indistinguishably, indeterminately, from every point in space directly around her.
doesn’t think that’s … unexpected, not really, the dual-locations, but that it’s from every point around here here is—she’s confused. And so the Awoken can sense her confusion, the implicit question of ‘what do I do now?’
controls his breathing through his nose, and forces out a pulse of tenebrous gnosis from the orb, looking to sense it through her.
ꙮ A pulse from the tenebrous orb, and it reaches out towards Salme, and at once, and shifting with their observations, they feel the pulse coming from every possible direction at once - finding her, and then having found her, it was only ever coming from one place - and then bouncing back, in every direction at once again. (And the Awoken can tell, with his [Empyrean Intuition], into which house of the sky the scout, from his own perspective on the ground on Mu, sent its pulse - towards the Empty Space.)
sends her own thread of tenebrous gnosis after it, just a small thread, to twine around the orb. Or attempts to. To see if anything can escape from where she sits in the library, in the Empty Space, to somewhere else.
ꙮ Most things could not. But tenebrous will, with its free wind? It reaches, in every direction at once, and then also, an impossibly-extended reach through the depths, towards the black hole, until it snaps, suddenly, absorbed by it.
thinks for a moment, and then tries again, this time sending out a liminal thread, her will and her desire to defy, transcend, move beyond the reality of a black hole which absorbs everything and releases nothing.
ꙮ Even liminal, even that which is defined by its un-definedness, it crosses the gap perhaps even easier than the tenebrous, but even it is snapped by the black hole. (As for the scout’s other position - for a moment you know precisely where it is, even though it makes no sense for it to be there, and then you do not know where it is, but you do know how fast it is going - forming a cloud of possibility within the space outside the Observatory.)
lets out a small, irritated huff of breath, and tries one more thing. Amphilyke. She held all three at once. Now she plies them together between her fingers—radiant, tenebrous, liminal—hand spinning them into a single thread and sends them out toward the scout.
ꙮ Once more, the gnosis reaches - and the amphilyke-resonance is more fragile, than the liminal or tenebrous on its own, and it nearly snaps, but it does not, until it, too, reaches the black hole, and is swallowed up without ceremony.
lets out a slightly more irritated huff, and shrugs, helplessly.
is delighted and amazed by her attempts, his heart going pitter-patter in awe. She’s done very well, and so it’s time to retrieve the payload. He clenches his hands into fists, and summons the orb back to himself.
[Walk The Strange Paths] - Reverse Mode
ꙮ There’s a vwooshing, vworping sort of noise, and the scout-fiend pops brightly into thin air in front of the Awoken.
is in turn delighted and amazed by his ingenuity, and her heart doesn’t go pitter-patter in awe, but it glows.
carefully examines the scout-fiend. How’d it fare? Shield hold up okay?
ꙮ It’ll need a few minor repairs, but the shield did its job!
: “Heheh, great work out there!” He gives the scout-fiend a comforting pat, and uses the sheet to bundle it up and sling it over his shoulder. He heads back to their room, and reenters the library (leaving the scout-fiend in the room).
hustles back to the observatory, starting to disrobe as he enters. Just- taking off his robe, at least. Well, and the top of his tunic. He’s very warm!
wouldn’t want him to pass out from heat stroke, certainly.
would, probably, consider trying a prince carry if she had to again.
: “Excellent experimentation, exemplar sparrow!” He’s bounding over to her.
laughs and hops down from the bench, directly into his arms. She knows he’ll catch her.
does catch her, with both arms, a snuggle, and a kiss!
rests her head on his shoulder. “Mu is in the black hole,” she says. “I’d thought it might be.”
: “The gnosis also being felt entirely within the observatory- and I would assume the Library in general- is also a thing I was sure of, but wanting to test. Doubly so that yes- I knew that the gnosis I detected so very far away, though there were no other stars to see, that it came from The Empty Space In The Sky.”
: “Hole-y Sock theory remains undefeated.”
: “It does. And also … the … sense of the signal you sent out, that I felt here, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once—I think it’s. Hm. Something to do with the refracting eyes that we saw when we were able to look at the empty space. That this space itself is liminal. Which, I suppose, makes sense, considering what we called it.”
giggles. “You both ended up very prescient!”
: “It was Aury’s name. Maybe he’ll turn out to be an oracle.”
: “Aur-acle. Light, my sense of humor is getting worse.”
laughs, now. “You’ve sharpened it on many a world!”
sighs, contentedly. “At least we know the black hole is a force strong enough to contain the corpse-god.”
: “If we ever need to do so ourselves… I figure we can replicate one! Somehow.”
: “Do you think it’s something that needs to be contained?”
: “Needs to, not neccessarily. At least, not what’s currently in Mu’s sky. But, y’know… if we ever meet another one.”
: “Or if this ever escapes the black hole and somehow causes havoc on the universe…?”
: “Hmm. Well. That’s certainly something to keep in mind. I wish we knew more about what it was.” She buries her face in his neck. “I mean—I’m going to find out more. Somehow. But still.”
gently rocks her, holding her tight. “Somehow.”