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

[giftedandtalented]

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

Comments

[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?"

[giftedandtalented]

"No, usually they wind up symmetrically attached to other vampires, or they meet humans, bite them, and then are symmetrically attached to other vampires."

[salus_populi]

"But the - potential," she says, "to react badly to the asymmetrical case. That seems like a major flaw."

[giftedandtalented]

"Yeah. It's not invariable, and also being a vampire is no longer permanent, you can fix it on a nontorchable by sending them through Downside or on a torchable with an evil. Werewolves from Aurum do something similar but they don't go stalkery, just kind of dependently depressive, in the worst case."

[salus_populi]

"Good to know," says Aelise.