A Stricken Beauty

[Shipfish]

==> Wander off of the path and get eaten by a grue.

You aren't THAT foolhardy. You have no idea what could be in this strange stone wood.


==> Go east!

This is an incredibly sensible decision. You gather yourself and your supplies, and head east, toward the blue thing in the sky.

You find this forest to be soothing. Pausing in your jogging path, you turn back to the west and look at how far you've come. From here, you can't see your hivetree, but you can see the exact route you took: Wafting in the wind are the sparks awoken by your passage. The wind being in a westerly direction, a few strands of your hair escaped the tie and tickled your face. The bright dust of your passage was beautiful as it flew between the trees, back the way you had come.

And it was quiet. Very, very quiet. There was not a sound in the whole forest (aside from the enormous crash of a Newfoundland landing nearby). The wind whistled tunelessly through the stone branches, and the dust itself hitting the trees was a quiet susurrus.

But you thought you should still go further, to keep from drawing enemies back to your hive. Turning around again, you continue to jog in the direction of the wind and that blue dot.

Abruptly, the forest died off. Not twenty feet away was an enormous drop, at least two hundred feet. Slowly you inch up to the precipice. You may not be scared of heights, but you have a healthy respect for falling. The view was magnificent. You could see a river, the water sparkling blackly, and more forest. Another plateau was hazy in the distance. Several large birds were circling an especially tall tree midway between the plateaus, the first animals you had seen besides the Newfoundlands.

You weren't going to find any enemies here though, so you must backtrack a little bit, and after that, you had a lovely idea to attract a few of the baddies.


==> Kick up a bunch more sparklies and let the imps come to you. No sense in giving up your position.

Look, this is a great idea. You aren't that stupid though.

So instead, you grab your other rope, find a suitable branch, and toss it on up there. With a little finagling, the rope was stoutly attached to a large branch about fifteen feet up.

And onto the second part of the plan. you got out of your bag a little bit of tinder and a match. Making a big pile of dust with your hands, shielding the heap from the wind with your body, you lit the tinder and shoved it deep into the pile. As quickly as you could, you scramble up the rope, and straddle the branch, pulling the rope up behind you.

Perfect. The tiny fire in the dust was acting exactly like a flare. You sat patiently while that blaring message filtered back through the forest.

What was that? You can see something coming from the west, large enough to shake a few trees. It emerged into the little clearing. A hulking parody of an imp stumbled towards your flare, with enormous tusks and huge hands that seemed ready to batter anything that stood in its way to pieces.

The ogre is currently under your position, distracted by the sparklies.

---

What now? Fight, don't fight, what?

[Quakerlol]

==> Fight the crap out of that thing! Get yourself some serious grist.

OR

==> Taunt it and find out if ogres can climb.

[Shipfish]

==> Fight the crap out of that thing! Get yourself some serious grist.

What an excellent suggestion. You had been itching for some real combat anyway, the imps were simply not a challenge at all.

Hefting your staff in your hand, you jumped from your position, using the shoulder of the enormous beast as a way to slow your fall. Without pausing for more than a moment, you flipped yourself forward.

Upside down in the air, you had a momentary glimpse of the ogre's face. Its black, beady eyes followed your path; its mouth opened wide in a fearsome snarl. Not wasting the opportunity, you snapped your staff up (or down, if one was talking relative to your current position) into the teeth of the monster. You heard several of them break, and perhaps the sound of carapace splitting, but anything you missed was unimportant.

You landed gracefully on your feet and descended quickly to one knee, the end of your staff on the ground, the rest leaning against your shoulder. The pose was a bit dramatic, but with the lumbering size of the ogre, he couldn't be moving very quickly. You spun up and around to face anything he was going to throw at you.

You were intensely surprised to find a lack of an ogre to fight. The direct wind blew steadily at the last of the flare in the sudden silence. You noticed that your lantern still hung on the end of your staff. Uh-oh, you must have hit the beast in the mouth with the lantern, causing it to open and spill that strange light everywhere. Snorting in disdain at your own mistake, you popped the lantern from the end of your staff and turned it towards you, so you could close the front panel.

It was a strange feeling, like being covered all over in feathers or something tickley like that, when the light showed on your face. Some unknown sense in you prickled, a close cousin to the sense that told you how far away from the hive you were, approximately.

Abruptly, the ogre was swinging at you in a blind rage. Automatically, you dodged the huge fist it swung at you, jumping backwards. Retreating strategically a little ways into the forest, you ditched your bag and lantern, swinging them onto a low branch, the better to fight unencumbered. The monster stumbled in after you, beating down the stone branches, shattering them.

That thing was tall, maybe about eight feet. The major areas to do damage were near the head, and they were too high to strike directly. As you danced ever backwards, avoiding blow after poorly-aimed blow, you noticed with a wry smile that the beast was doing more damage to itself than you were dealing it.

Spotting an opportunity when the lumbering monster paused to untangle its tusks from a branch, you swiftly dodged around to its back, and with a quick poke, you pushed the ogre's knee in. It fell almost comically slowly, groaning exactly like a large tree being timbered.

Once grounded, you promptly levered the beast's head to the side and jabbed the tissue at the joint of the ogre's carapace, stunning the creature for a few seconds. While it was out, you opened its mouth and used your staff to push through the soft tissue of the palate and scrambling whatever this thing used for a brain. It dissolved into grist like it was supposed to.

You collected all your grist, and jogged back to where your bag and lantern swung from a tree-branch. Mindlessly, you shouldered the bag and reattached the lantern to the end of your staff.

Gazing into the middle distance, you shuddered. You were sure, beyond sure, that something very strange had happened with that lantern, and you thought you knew what. But that was impossible, perfectly impossible. You simply cannot go back in time.

But the idea was cemented when you caught sight of yourself, standing with your back to the wind on a small hilltop, looking at the trail you had previously broken through the sparkling dust.

---

Choose your path wisely, traveller, for the way is treacherous and testing, dark and dangerous, full of pitfalls and paradoxes.

[Quakerlol]

==> Is that you? Go talk to her and find out when you are! Or, wait, if that's past you, then you never talked to yourself, so...... don't do that.

==> Mess around with the lantern and do some stuff!

[Shipfish]

==> Is that you? Go talk to her and find out when you are! Or, wait, if that's past you, then you never talked to yourself, so...... don't do that.

The command console has that completely right. In fact, you don't remember seeing anything in this area of the woods when you passed by here, so you'd best duck behind something quick, before your past self passed by this way.

This was going to get horribly confusing.

Quickly, you scampered back to your hive, very careful to avoid where you remembered your past self passing. As you went, you checked Gristtorrent for your grist levels. That ogre had earned you more than the imps had combined, and put you just above the level you had started with before creating the singularity.

After ascending the rope you had left to your tree-hive, you trudged into the living room, tossing the bag onto the couch and falling down after it. You put your head into your hands, trying so hard to think about how this was going to work.

It was a few moments before you noticed the pair of shoes tapping an impatient beat in front of you. Lifting you head from your cupped hands, you saw...

Well, you. You had your arms crossed in front of you, tapping your toes against the floor. You were smiling though, and your hair was actually brushed. Also, you had on a sweet outfit, red and maroon, with a military-style half-jacket, and pants that looked comfortable and practical. The gear design was attractive too, not too fancy.

You spoke. "Just discovered the time travel thing, I see!"

You, that is, present you, was still a little too dumbfounded to speak. This was weird. Present you was not at all used to seeing other versions of yourself.

"Sorryy, yyeah, have to do this to preserve the loop." Seeing your look of confusion, she grinned even wider. "YYou'll figure it out. YYou will remember to go back and do stuff, trust me, it comes naturallyy for us." She shifted position, obviously wanting to get done with this fiasco.

You found your voice, finally. "Where... Excuse me, when are yyou from?" Barely paying attention to you, something you hadn't seen before behind the other you shimmered, and she fluttered her wings a little bit. Wings, you get wings somewhen.

"Oh, far off, yyou won't be me for a veryy long time. I onlyy came back this far to tell yyou how to work the lantern, everyything was dreadfullyy dull at this point." She looked impatient, though still curiously happy.

"Um, alright then." You held up the lantern, shuttered, but still casting that odd radiance.

"Alright! Well, see here is a little lever yyou can use to open the shutter without casting the light on yyourself, which yyou will want to avoid unless yyou want to travel." She pointed to a little thing near the handle. "And the dial to adjust the light... determines how far forward or back yyou will go..." A scant little thing on the back of the lantern. "Don't worryy, yyou will get a hang of how far to spin it in just a little bit." She seemed pleased with herself, and quite ready to leave.

"But wait, can't yyou tell me when yyou are from? Or, or, some of the important things that will happen to me?" You got up from the couch and followed yourself onto the porch, where she had wandered, looking with a faint smile at everything in the house.

"No, of course not! That would be cheating. Well, I think that will be all, I'm going now. A yyounger version of me will be around to give yyou some stuff later, I think." Abruptly, without any sort of motion, future you winked out of existence.

---

Welp. What to do now?

[Quakerlol]

==> Can you combine the SINGULARITY with some more stuff? Maybe a weapon?

[Shipfish]

==> Can you combine the SINGULARITY with some more stuff? Maybe a weapon?

What, why? It took a good deal of grist to make the lantern, and one time-manipulation device was all you could handle right now. After all, you have barely a clue how this one works, no matter if an older, cleaner, and significantly higher-leveled version of yourself had attempted to explain it. You held up the lantern with an expression of almost disbelief. Time travel, this was going to get really complicated really fast.

But an idea struck you. The gate, the goal up in the sky. Nutty had said that it would take you deeper into your land, and it appeared that you had already mostly out-grown the imps on the plateau, and the ogre hadn't been a challenge once you got it down. You sought the comforting weight of your staff and ventured onto the porch to find Nutty again. You espied him, apparently entangled in the upper limbs of her hivetree.

SPRITELOG
Kyanas: Nuttyy, yyou up there?
Nutty: YES! WHY?
Kyanas: The green thing up there is a gate to myy land, right?
Nutty: ABSOLUTELY! YOU WILL LIKE IT THERE!
Kyanas: How do I get to it?
Nutty: YYour server player is supposed to build yyour hive up to it, but everyyone else seems to FLY THERE INSTEAD!!

You thanked him kindly and left him to do... whatever it was he had been doing, tangled up in the tree as he was. You shook your head, the poor beast was still incredibly silly, even if he did seem to have in-game knowledge now.

You walked back inside and considered your options. You could talk to Isaard, your server player. You could also estimate the cost of building up to that height by checking in on Lerena. The second option is actually a much better idea, and you proceed to start on that.

You open up the server player's interface and click around to see how much grist it costs to build another approximate floor on the hive. You calculate the number of stories needed to reach the gate with a quick peek outside, and decide that it costs entirely too much in the way of resources to actually build up there. It never crosses your mind to actually check up on Lerena.

So that leaves flying! But fly on what, how? You certainly did not have a device for flight tucked away anywhere, nor a large balloon, nor any other easily conceivable method of getting to the gate. Oh, but right, you could probably fix something up with the alchemiter system. You suppose you could always start with the fully articulated scale model of Troll da Vinci's famous troll-powered flying machine.

You opened the display case and gently removed the delicate model. This baby had taken WEEKS to build, and the directions had been horrendous. Quickly captchaloguing the device, and regaining the card before the army had a chance to scamper off, you idly wondered what you were going to combine it with to make it work. Obviously the device would no longer function properly if simply scaled up, physics didn't work that way. Though stranger things had happened today, perhaps a liberal application of troll physics and in-a-game-world cheating would solve it.

You finally settled on a medical text on the average strength of muscles in the troll body. Your reasoning was that it would change the machine to be able to be worked by your own strength. It was worth a try, and try you would.

Running an || operation clearly did not work, as the result was a jumbled pile of paper rolls and thin sheets, presumably supposed to be in the shape of an aircraft. You took the mess outside to burn later.

A && operation was much more successful. It didn't look exactly like your model, as it seemed to be designed to fold up into a smaller size for storage. When you began to extend it, you realized the wingspan would be rather too large to fit in the room, so you put it back and lugged the thing outside. It was much lighter than it looked, but very bulky.

Fully expanded, the thing was quite a beauty. It was elegant, clean-cut, and best of all looked like it might be able to work. You got your stuff from inside, staff and bag and lantern. There was a little hook to hang your lantern by in the front, and a little clasp to hold your bag. Wonderful thing, serendipity.

Finally you strapped yourself in somewhat awkwardly, and took a running leap off the side of your hive, praying feverishly to the twin moons that you would not fall and die.

It took you a moment or two of frantic scrambling to figure out how to flap and steer, but after that the sensation of flying under your own power was glorious. You were aware, though, that the steady westward wind was pushing you too far back, and shifted around to compensate, drifting upward in lazy arcs.

At some point, you became level with the gate, and headed for it, almost casually slipping through it.

[Quakerlol]

==> Get to your land and find your quest!