do: make introductions; don't: usurp the government

[giftedandtalented]

Tab goes home by door, right into Aelise's office. "Hello again."

Comments

[giftedandtalented]

"Yeah. I think I'll take my guided teleporting for a spin and see if it finds me a nice place!"

Tab teleports - somewhere!

[pythbox]

'Somewhere' turns out to be a planet. It has a purplish blue sky, a breathable atmosphere, and - where Tab is standing - a beachful of glittering silver-grey sand.

Some distance away, the sand gives way to scrubby pale purple grass, which in turn heralds the beginning of a forest. The trees are huge. Their craggy black trunks grow in thick, majestic spirals up to at least a few hundred feet, with branches spreading out in wider arcs from the corkscrew trunks, sparsely near the bottom but in thick sprays up top. The end of each branch has a wide pointed leaf with blotchy zigzag stripes of colour banding from the base to the tip, almost like they were tie-dyed. Colourful vines twine around trunks and branches and dangle like leafy ropes all the way back down to the forest floor.

But there's no sound except the rustle of vegetation in the slight breeze - no squirrels, no mice, no birds. No mobile life of any kind.

[giftedandtalented]

[This place is awesome! Also this air appears to be pretty airlike, want to come see?]

[salus_populi]

[Ooh.]

Aelise teleports.

"...Very nice," she says, tipping her head back to squint up at the treetops.

[giftedandtalented]

"No kidding. I will hunt up a good place to put a Toronto." And Tab kicks off the ground, clears the treeline, and zooms.

[salus_populi]

Aelise laughs.

The planet turns out to be heavily forested, but there is one low-lying plain nearby - covered mostly in various purple grasses - that happens to have a configuration of lake and rivers very similar to pre-nuking Toronto. The city could be plopped right onto the edge of the lake with only minor adjustments to the surrounding landscape.

[giftedandtalented]

[Guided teleportation! It is awesome!] whoops Tab.

[salus_populi]

[You found a good spot, I assume?]

[giftedandtalented]

[Even the water is very nearly right. I'll have to level a little terrain and nudge the mouth of that stream and otherwise I can just plunk the city down, looks like.]

[salus_populi]

[Good for guided teleportation,] says Aelise.

[giftedandtalented]

[Hip, hip, hooray! I need to name this planet, hmmm.]

[salus_populi]

['Spiral',] she suggests. ['Arborea'.]

[giftedandtalented]

Tab flies higher for a better view of the broader landscape, the global climate. Up-up-up. [Maybe.]

[salus_populi]

The global climate varies almost as much as Earth's, but those huge spiral trees are definitely a theme - there must be hundreds of species with the same basic shape.

[Got any better ideas?]

[giftedandtalented]

[I just wanted to see if the big spiraly trees were all over the place, and they are. Arborea it is.]

[salus_populi]

[All right.]

[giftedandtalented]

[Awesome awesome awesome. Hey Jane, can you star chart this place and figure out where we are?]

[mind_game]

There is a pause, and then Jane says, [I have definitively determined that I have no clue at all! We are probably not even in the Milky Way!]

[salus_populi]

Aelise laughs.

"I wonder if asking Demauri would help. With time and math we could probably figure out what direction this solar system is from ours, anyway."

[giftedandtalented]

"You want to explain to Demauri that you have traveled to a planet you have no idea where the heck it is, please find you?"

[salus_populi]

"Hmm, point. But he's Demauri. He's used to my bizarre requests."

[giftedandtalented]

"Fair enough. Golden recognized him, apparently on her world he was a vampire, they do this mating-for-life but he spun the mate-for-life roulette wheel and wound up with a half-vampire and they don't do that, he wound up kind of mad-stalker until she - the stalking victim - killed him."

[salus_populi]

"Interesting," she says. "I can see how that would work Gift-wise - did the alt have the same power? - but Demauri's never been the stalking type."

[giftedandtalented]

"Same approximate power, yeah, less powerful as seems to be the theme - he had to have met the person and couldn't triangulate very effectively. Golden thinks he thought he was playing some elaborate game of hide-and-seek game with her till the very end."

[salus_populi]

"Well, that's unpleasant," says Aelise. "Is that a common feature of Aurum vampires?"