ꙮ A day and change of frantic, frenetic work on the lenses, a night of getting as much work done as possible outside while the sun’s low on the horizon, and now, a short distance from Gate Two, in the middle of a patch of sandy rock, there’s a large, heavy canvas tent set up, with a long, telescoping brass tube sticking out of it, capped at the end by what looks to all the world like a totally opaque end-cap (and, at the moment, is - there’s a little metal rod running along the entire length of the telescope that opens the truly opaque aperture, because even with all the filtering that’s happening, the sun, when magnified, is a deadly laser, and it’s impossible to be too careful.) Right now, you’re still standing in the shade of Gate Two’s desert entrance, bundled up enough that it won’t have to be a mad dash to the shelter of the tent.
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drinks from a bota and pours water on his face from another one- washing his face to wake himself up a bit but also to prepare against the elements. He’s fully clothed up and ready for this experiment.
is also properly attired for being outside—veil, sunglasses, scarf, cloak. She’s actually well rested today because she had the sense to not sleep alone. The thing about Mu, though, is that whether you’re in a cave or outside beneath the open sky, it always feels like something is bearing down on you. It’s … honestly worse out here. “Did you get much rest, Awa?”
: “Mmm… not really! It’s okay, I’m borrowing time from the future.”
: “I’ll sleep… soon enough!”
ꙮ Can’t sleep, there’s science to do!
isn’t really sure that’s how that works, but hey, maybe it is how that works. Time is fucky here.
: “Got the image papers ready?”
ꙮ Outside the tent, there’s something that looks like it was probably a bunch of junk copper once that someone went at with some absolutely maniacal burning gnosis to melt in-place into a giant heatsink, connected to the tent with a metal tube. Inside the tent: blissfully dark, for one thing, with some little gnosis-burner lamps tuned to a specific frequency so as to not disrupt the experiment. The bulk of the tent is taken up by the experimental apparatus: the telescope intrudes into the tent, there’s an armature built around it, clearly inspired by the Library Observatory’s, albeit much simpler, and then a bigass octagonal thing about waist high and mostly covered in black canvas, with heat-pipes sprouting from it and winding outside like wayward roots.
nods, and pulls out her satchel once they enter the tent. She has a whole codex worth of papers, kept flat between two thick covers, the whole thing wrapped in several careful layers of cloth to avoid light exposure. “I made friends with Zvahr Yhjrn who heads up the archives in the City, and she gave me plenty of these. I’m making some written copies of certain folios for her.”
takes a moment to wonder at the complex apparatus. “You did this in the span of … what, a day? With help, yes, but still.” She looks at him, and adds with a bit of chagrin. “Well. A day and a night.”
ꙮ The central apparatus is the Awoken’s to uncover! Or to leave covered, I’m not sure if it needs to be completely sequestered from light, I didn’t build it.
: “Good good good!” He runs a hand along the telescope under the tent. “Something like that! It’s easy when your first shot at an idea ends up hitting the mark.”
: “Ari’s a miracleworker himself- managed to recreate the ridiculous prism that is going to save us a lot of time and energy.” It’ll be sequestered from light when opening the telescope, yeah. But for now, he uncovers it, because they need to set the papers into their brackets, and the prism is a sight to behold itself.
offers him as many papers as he might need.
: “I guess that would make it easier, but still not easy.”
: “This is …” she shakes her head. She’s seen wonders, but she keeps seeing wonders as well.
ꙮ An enormous, perfectly-cut crystal-glass prism, shunting the vast majority of the sun’s light that makes it through the optics train into the heatpipes, leaving enough to be diverted through gnosis-tuned lenses, focused, perfectly, onto the sun-paper. It is, truly, magnificent.
: “So. Where do we start?”
sets papers along the octagonical sides, locking them in place with perfectly placed brackets. “Set these in…”
: “Cover it up…”
: “Open the lens..”
ꙮ There’s a side-projection out of the optics train into a box that looks terrifyingly bolted-on to the telescope; one side of the box is made of what looks like rakaznar, with an inlaid metal circle. The rakaznar’s primed to glow in response to the Sun’s light - so you’ll be able to use it to determine precise direction and dial in the focus!
: “And then, along here–“ He traces his finger along the end of the scope, coming to a fairly thick handle that is meant to be gripped with some force, with etched lines coming from it and tracing down into the end of the scope. “There’s a handle here, which you want to pull, and it’ll briefly shut off the light while striking the papers with gnosis- I recommend burning, pellucid, and flourishing at the same time! Irrica gnosis pictures!”
nods though she’s fairly lost. “What do you need me to do? Pull the handle?”
throws the cover back over the central octagon structure. “Pretty much. Also pay attention to this box-“ he taps the ra’kaznar sensor. “-because uh, we still can’t look directly at the sun, so when this thing glows a particular way– you’ll know it when you see it– holler out for us to stop aiming.”
nods again, and runs her fingers over the rakaznar. “Okay.”
ꙮ Like the Observatory’s telescope, it’s a two-person job.
swoops over to give her a kiss on the cheek! Muah!
smiles at him, and kisses him back.
: “Okay!” He swoops back to the other side of the telescope, grabbing into a wheeled gizmo and unlatches a geegaw. These are very technical terms. He turns the wheel, which slowly makes the cover to the lens rise.
ꙮ The telescope immediately, tangibly, starts heating up. Nothing the heatpipes can’t handle, although the entire optics train isn’t even engaged yet. The rakaznar face of the box glows - it’s askew and out of focus, to the left of and bigger than the target circle, and blurry!
: “It’s out of focus. You’ll want to move to the right and zoom out slightly,” she says, looking at the rakaznar box.
: “On it-“ He twists a crank and unlatches something near the base, then grabs onto a handle attached to a horizontal wheel, and cranks that way as well. It’s probably smarter to do one direction at a time, but he’s feelin’ himself.
ꙮ You’ve got a good [Empyrean Intuition] for how to control both settings at once in a way that keeps the Sun from being any LESS in-focus, honestly! And as Salme watches, the image in rakaznar drifts closer and closer, and closer and closer, and finally the outline itself blossoms with a bright, perfect light!
: “Stop,” she commands, and then pulls the handle with one strong, even application of force. As she does, she sends a weave of flourishing, burning, and pellucid gnosis into and through the handle as instructed.
halts on a dime!
ꙮ The entire apparatus really heats up, then - little crystal indicators on the heat-pipes slowly going from ‘dim’ to ‘a dull yellow’ to ‘a brighter, more insistent yellow, verging on orange’…
ꙮ The longer you let it run, the clearer the image will be, but how long do you dare push the system? 🙧
will let Salme’s heart decide that one. 🙧
’s heart is an unreliable thing. It always wants as much as it can possibly have. Her mind tells her to take what they can safely get, that they can always make a second attempt later. Her heart, though. Her heart … “Sininen, can you displace some of the heat out of the pipes with gnosis? I want as clear an image as we can get.”
: “Ha ha! I love it!” He reaches for the underside of the telescope- it’s absolutely sweltering down there, but there’s a main thoroughline that ends up connecting all the heat pipes together. Quickly, he takes a pair of gloves from his belt, dons them, and closes his eyes… focusing on a radiant layer of gnosis appearing within the tubes, and focuses on pushing it all out… and then again, and then again…
ꙮ Liminal, [Take Half] - the heat-pipes are a kind of path, from here to there, for a certain kind of energy to take; the Awoken simply shortens the way.
ꙮ The indicators on the pipes go from an orange the City’s citrus groves could be proud of, up into red, up into Angry Red, which somehow feels distinct as a colour.
ꙮ The heatsink outside starts screaming, metal against metal at a molecular level, which may not be a thing of which you knew metal was capable, under certain sufficient extrema!
thinks this, perhaps, is a sign, and releases the handle.
ꙮ The moment you release the handle, there’s an icy rush of gnosis released from a sequence of little glass beads placed in slots in the heat-pipes that all shatter on command, like the little Samudran signal-beads you remember, immediately bringing the system down out of ‘hazardous as all get-out’ without putting the prism or any of the lenses in danger of thermal shock. There’s a vapory hiss, and a click as the master lenscap closes over the direct aperture outside. The lights in the tent grow a little brighter.
ꙮ …nothing seems to have exploded, so that’s a good sign!
: “Whe—————-w!” he exhales, coming up from below the telescope, sweating profusely. He quicky removes his gloves and throws them aside, waving his hands about at his sides like he’s trying to cool them off.
: “Excellent timing!”
hops over to him, and does not quite tackle him with a hug, but definitely hugs him. “Thank you for … thank you for getting what I needed you to do immediately and then doing it.”
is grinning. She maybe looks a bit like a madwoman.
is noticably warm as she hugs him, and he hugs her back, gently swaying the both of them.
: “Of course! Your ideas are amazing, and worth pursuing!”
blushes a little, and buries her face in his shoulder for just a moment. And then. “Do you want to look at the images?”
: “Let’s see ‘em!” He rubs her shoulders a bit before clapping them and, arm around them, four-legged walks to the covered octagon, carefully picking at it with his fingertips.
ꙮ Cool enough to touch, if you’re quick about it.
thinks that, of course, he is. Quick about it.
ꙮ Can one imagine the Awoken otherwise? Papers collected from emplacements designed to be more difficult to set up than to tear down; getting the papers in properly was a painstaking process but getting them out, well, that part’s simple.
ꙮ The images are crisp. Different lenses filtered different gnosis-resonances from the light, different patterns of blackened paper, dusted lightly with irrica.
ꙮ The images show…
ꙮ They show…
: “If it’s just whatever’s in the sky making an extremely rude gesture I am going to be exceptionally pissed off.”
takes a moment to appreciate the glow of the prism, and slowly lets his eyes drift over the assembled photos…
: “I would die laughing and consider it a Good End.”
: “Of course you would.”
The Sun is, unambiguously, something’s corpse. It’s hard to tell what it is, even with the telescope’s exacting, magnificent detail. Something wingéd, at least; you can see the tattered wings outlined on the pages. It’s been shattered; there’s a hole torn straight through the middle of it.
: “Oh.”
adds, a little hysterically, “And here I told Aury I’d stop being weird about dead bodies.”
: “Ehhhh I think it’s okay to be weird about this one.” He pulls heavily from a nearby bota, really turning it over with the taste of orange water.
It is, fundamentally, and visibly just from the slides, an unstable system. Pieces of it were in flux and in movement, as the images were etched. It must be being held together with spit and baling wire, so to speak, although you’re not sure how or by what means.
Furthermore, and perhaps most strangely, some of the slides are almost completely devoid of any image. The Sun’s light is an absolutely searing, aggressive admixture of flourishing, pellucid, and burning gnosis, of greater magnitude than you could have imagined; it is a wonder - and a testament to its creator and the artisans who constructed it, and to the perspicacity of its operator, that the sunscope survived long enough to produce these images.
ꙮ …why can’t I see them? 🙧
: “You can’t?”
: “Whoof… you’re missin’ out.”
ꙮ They don’t look like anything to me. Just a blur.
touches the edge of one of the images. “I can try to describe them to you? If—if you want. If it wouldn’t hurt you.”
is asking a question, though not of you, silmät.
They wouldn’t be able to hear you, if you described it. Which means you can talk about the images, as much as you’d like, without worrying about causing harm you didn’t intend to cause.
: “Why can’t—“ takes a slow breath. “Okay. Is the presence of flourishing, pellucid, and burning because of what I used to render the images when I pulled the handle, or if I used the other triad would the result be the same?”
ꙮ I am, to be fair, wildly curious? And I appreciate the thought, very much. But I have a feeling if you tried, it wouldn’t work, so– I’ll be fine, don’t worry about me!
: “Narrator, buddy… I need you to put on a thinkin’ cap. And really, really think, here.”
: “Would you say you have any blind spots?”
ꙮ Salme first! The images on the paper are made by the Sun’s light - the gnosis you used when operating the handle couldn’t possibly have made any difference to what images were produced.
ꙮ Awoken! Probably? There’s a trick that you or Salme could do whereby you can visualise your own blind spots by rolling up a tube and looking through it, or… something like that, I don’t know the details. Maybe somehow, bafflingly, you’ve discovered how to do that trick on me?
: “Funny how we used a big tube to do it…”
ꙮ Honestly, that is really funny.
: “We’re not doing it on purpose if we are doing it.”
: “The shortest answer is, Glory’s involved.”
looks at the images carefully. Is there any sense of the size of the corpse? Is it larger than a human body, or is the admixture of gnosis creating such an aura around it that it seems sun-sized in the sky? Or is it closer than a sun should be? Is there clearly only one corpse?
ꙮ Yeah, I know. I’m not going to say ‘you’d never’, because I’m pretty sure you have before a long time ago, but that was funny in immediate retrospect too, and I understand why that happened now, and if this is… anything like that was. I mean, I don’t get it, but I’m not going to worry about it. What did you discover? Worst case scenario, I can’t hear what you’re talking about, and I just imagine you’re saying nice things about me where I can’t hear.
: “Another corpse. This time in the sky. With wings.”
It’s very hard to have any concept of scale, unfortunately, although to be as large as the Sun appears from the ground, it would have to be tremendously large.
: “…another?”
: “Awa. Tell me it would be incredibly foolhardy to immediately go into the library and try to talk with it. Tell me I should be satisfied with this and that we should mull this over.”
waves her hand. “Oh. Sorry I was thinking about the pretty normal undecayed dead guy in the locked room Aury and Luĉja found. I’m making inappropriate jokes.”
: “Salme.” And he looks her directly in the eyes.
: “I would never stop you from talking to a corps–“
physically falters, his legs almost giving out on him, and he grips at her as he stumbles. His eyes are clearly unfocused.
catches him. She’s strong. “Awa, are you okay?”
: “I’m just… a little hot under the collar, is all…”
: “Another drink and a nap ought to do some good…” And it’s like he’s falling asleep right there.
breathes out a slow breath of relief. “Okay. We can do that.” One handed, she packs up the images and tucks them into her satchel and then puts all her outerwear back on. She also makes sure his is back on too. And then, with a heft, she picks him up in a fireman’s carry.
ꙮ She deftly carries her synomote out of the tent, across the sand, and down into Gate Two; it’s a blessedly short distance from this gate to somewhere she can set him down, and Ari’s apprentice is waiting fairly close by and immediately runs, not walks, off to go get an entire pitcher of Orange Water and some cool towels.
starts to recover in the mouth of the caves, and slowly, tactically, places cool towls under his clothes.
is combing his hair with her fingers, sending soft trickles of cool pellucid gnosis through the strands along with her fingers.
ꙮ Luckily (but unfortunately for the apostates) they know how to handle heat exhaustion, here!
starts to bounce back, though stays reclined. He drinks. He drinks again.
stays next to him and doesn’t pace.
ꙮ Orange Water… It’s Got Electrolytes.
: “Ahh… thank you, sweet sparrow,” he sighs, nuzzling into one of her hands.
smiles at him. “I’m glad you’re bouncing back. The dramatic swooning was a bit alarming.”
smiles. “It was just good timing.”
: “Which, to return to that…”
adjusts slightly, idly trying to kick off his boots.
: “I think… you could try to talk to it, but I think the conversation is just gonna be a bunch of screaming and angry.”
immediately starts helping take off his boots. “Possible. But I’ve had some luck with talking to strange and upset inhuman things before.”
slips off one of his boots, then starts on the next.
: “How about one that is endlessly experiencing the moment of death?”
shrugs. “I don’t know. I can’t know, unless I try.”
lightly laughs. “‘atta girl.”
gets his second boot off. “You’re supposed to tell me I’m being stupid and going to get hurt and tell me not to.” She sets his boots neatly next to him. “But you don’t really do that, do you?” She goes back to stroking his hair.
: “Heheh… nah, I really don’t.”
: “Being smart and safe… it’s good. It’s a good idea.”
: “But there are times… people… places… that draw away unless you are vulnerable.”
: “And sometimes, you’ll get hurt. And you’ll do things, stupid things, you might not have before.”
: “You can blame yourself, you can blame them…”
: “Or you could just… not blame anything, and get up the next day with the same grace you had before.”
looks at him for a long, long moment, and then says, “I love you,” and doesn’t even mean the way her words shimmer with aletheic energy, it’s just there, helplessly true, outside her control.
asks, “Okay. What do you need right now? You did something amazing, and as much as I immediately might want to know, I want to take care of you more than I need to jump into some esoteric experiment.”
: “Ahh… help me back to the room, I just need a soft bed, more towels, and… probably not to fall asleep too soon, before it’s known that I can actually keep down all this drink.”
: “I’d like to know about what you’ve all found!”
: “Been busy with the telescope and all.”
: “Yeah. I missed you. I always miss you.” She stands, and offers him both of her hands to help him stand. “Thank you for doing so much work on that. It … I really appreciate it.”
takes her hands and easily stands. Fortunately, the cavern floor isn’t a rough, rubble filled mess, is it? He can get by on footwraps. “It was a really, really interesting idea! Wonder what tipped SQ off to actually look at the thing.”
: “Yeah. I have … several questions for her.” She picks up his discarded boots. “We’ll see if she manages to answer any of them.”
ꙮ Cavern floor is smooth as a swift’s fur and kept clear with steadfast vigilance. Footwraps will be just fine!
: “Anyway, I guess the most important thing I should tell you about is the ciphered letter in the library …”
: “Ooh, how mysterious…!”