Re: The BATTLE of the CENTURY! [S!7] - Round 1: The New Frontier
07-30-2012, 04:09 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.
Among the many hobbies that kept Fisher entertained was a uniquely wizardly capacity to dream a cogent narrative. Such was the force of the magician’s subconscious that the main way he distinguished between dreams and reality was that the dreams tended to take place outside of his apartment. The entire announcement of this “business partnership” had the character of one of his dreams, up until the representative of the Council of whatever-the-hell had pressed a button and Fisher had found himself inside a cloud.
It was the cold, wet sensation that snapped the magician into lucidity. The man had spent five years in an environment that transcended “room temperature,” where the air itself obeyed his whims. The cloud did not care about Fisher one way or another. It stung his eyes and matted his beard. It soaked through his shorts and made the hair on his arms stand on end as if trying to escape. The wizard, normally only aware of his body as something that occasionally itched when he sat on it for too long, suddenly felt unnaturally physical, all the way down to his gnarled and creaking bones. He felt like a tree in a storm. He felt nauseous. He clutched at the papers he had been handed and shoved them in front of his face like a crude mask.
After some seconds, he felt sunlight. That was strange for him, too.
A cheer went up from all around Fisher, who, shaking, lowered the papers.
He was on the deck of some sort of ship. A flying ship, through some haphazard assortment of spinning rotors and hot-air bladders, soaring through the sky at a good clip. A few dozen passengers were scattered throughout the deck in groups of five or six, some wearing fine clothing, some wearing rags, all of them looking dirty and hungry and wet and broken. Fisher had them pegged as refugees of war. The crewmembers numbered around ten, that Fisher could see, marked off by their simple blue uniforms and sturdy physique. They stood in formations suggesting that they were supposed to be tending to the rigging or directing the flow of passengers out the hatches, but most, like the passengers, were simply standing agape. Fisher, unused to standing in crowds, took a minute to see what they were looking at.
The island was about ten miles square, roughly circular, and ringed by a few smaller satellite islands. It’s underside was a bowl of uneven bedrock, with here and there a snakelike root pushing through from the softer earth on the inside. The island’s surface was dominated by something straddling the line between a jungle and a forest and textured with any number of habitable-looking clearings. More bizarre, though not, Fisher supposed, all that implausible postulating a floating island, was the water—rivers and streams flowed from a large hilltop lake and cascaded off the edge of the island towards the clouds below.
He could tell even from this distance that the island was teeming with life—large winged shadows circling like the specter of death, or hope—but not civilization. Maybe it only floats because no one’s ever told it not to, thought Fisher, looking around warily at the refugees. They would come here, to this untouched place, out of a need for a little fruit and a place to set up a tent, and the island would welcome them, and that would be fine. But it would never be enough. Sooner or later they’d need to cut roads through that forest, they’d need to dig wells to figure out where exactly that water was coming from, they’d need to dig up that bedrock to build, say, a post office. What depressed Fisher was not the inevitability of destructive progress, but his utter dependence on the same. The magician couldn’t function in a paradise. Frontiers sickened him. He needed room temperature. He needed people rich enough to hire him and people poor enough for him to hire and no mingling between the two.
The magician looked down at the items in his hand. In his right hand he held the pen. He flicked the tiny blade out from its hiding spot and back in again. Here is tool, he thought. In his left hand he held the two dossiers he’d been given on his fellow refugees. Her eyes are two massive rubies, he skimmed, and thought, Here is knowledge. Knowledge plus Tool equals Power.
The once-powerful wizard clung to these gifts he had been given, now his only advantage, and felt the wind tickle his beard for the first time in years.
Among the many hobbies that kept Fisher entertained was a uniquely wizardly capacity to dream a cogent narrative. Such was the force of the magician’s subconscious that the main way he distinguished between dreams and reality was that the dreams tended to take place outside of his apartment. The entire announcement of this “business partnership” had the character of one of his dreams, up until the representative of the Council of whatever-the-hell had pressed a button and Fisher had found himself inside a cloud.
It was the cold, wet sensation that snapped the magician into lucidity. The man had spent five years in an environment that transcended “room temperature,” where the air itself obeyed his whims. The cloud did not care about Fisher one way or another. It stung his eyes and matted his beard. It soaked through his shorts and made the hair on his arms stand on end as if trying to escape. The wizard, normally only aware of his body as something that occasionally itched when he sat on it for too long, suddenly felt unnaturally physical, all the way down to his gnarled and creaking bones. He felt like a tree in a storm. He felt nauseous. He clutched at the papers he had been handed and shoved them in front of his face like a crude mask.
After some seconds, he felt sunlight. That was strange for him, too.
A cheer went up from all around Fisher, who, shaking, lowered the papers.
He was on the deck of some sort of ship. A flying ship, through some haphazard assortment of spinning rotors and hot-air bladders, soaring through the sky at a good clip. A few dozen passengers were scattered throughout the deck in groups of five or six, some wearing fine clothing, some wearing rags, all of them looking dirty and hungry and wet and broken. Fisher had them pegged as refugees of war. The crewmembers numbered around ten, that Fisher could see, marked off by their simple blue uniforms and sturdy physique. They stood in formations suggesting that they were supposed to be tending to the rigging or directing the flow of passengers out the hatches, but most, like the passengers, were simply standing agape. Fisher, unused to standing in crowds, took a minute to see what they were looking at.
The island was about ten miles square, roughly circular, and ringed by a few smaller satellite islands. It’s underside was a bowl of uneven bedrock, with here and there a snakelike root pushing through from the softer earth on the inside. The island’s surface was dominated by something straddling the line between a jungle and a forest and textured with any number of habitable-looking clearings. More bizarre, though not, Fisher supposed, all that implausible postulating a floating island, was the water—rivers and streams flowed from a large hilltop lake and cascaded off the edge of the island towards the clouds below.
He could tell even from this distance that the island was teeming with life—large winged shadows circling like the specter of death, or hope—but not civilization. Maybe it only floats because no one’s ever told it not to, thought Fisher, looking around warily at the refugees. They would come here, to this untouched place, out of a need for a little fruit and a place to set up a tent, and the island would welcome them, and that would be fine. But it would never be enough. Sooner or later they’d need to cut roads through that forest, they’d need to dig wells to figure out where exactly that water was coming from, they’d need to dig up that bedrock to build, say, a post office. What depressed Fisher was not the inevitability of destructive progress, but his utter dependence on the same. The magician couldn’t function in a paradise. Frontiers sickened him. He needed room temperature. He needed people rich enough to hire him and people poor enough for him to hire and no mingling between the two.
The magician looked down at the items in his hand. In his right hand he held the pen. He flicked the tiny blade out from its hiding spot and back in again. Here is tool, he thought. In his left hand he held the two dossiers he’d been given on his fellow refugees. Her eyes are two massive rubies, he skimmed, and thought, Here is knowledge. Knowledge plus Tool equals Power.
The once-powerful wizard clung to these gifts he had been given, now his only advantage, and felt the wind tickle his beard for the first time in years.