Heaven and its Wonders [24 Consimbs 4385]

[sythyry]

Mirrored from Sythyry.

Yerenthax and Jyondre thundered forward, out the last door from the Thick Petals chamber. They had more of a journey.

Golden Pyramids

The first chamber they stormed through was Golden Pyramids. Lots of Golden Pyramids, ranging in height from six inches to six hundred feet. (Jyondre could just touch the chamber’s roof from the top of the tallest one.) Most of them were square-based pyramids; a few were triangular, or pentagonal, or even conical. The larger ones had entrances in each face, and the much larger ones had a second set of entrances far above the first. The outsides of the pyramids were golden plates. (We are getting used to seeing so much stone and metal.) The floor between the pyramids was carpeted a subdued blue-green.

Yerenthax: “Let us explore these caverns!”

So they did, venturing intrepidly into them. The first one they had a long twisty corridor, squirming through near-darkness, only lit by a few scattered guttering sconces burning sandalwood and myrrh. At length they came to a small chamber containing only a low wooden table, set with six plates. Upon each plate was a freshly-cooked, steaming sandwich of broccoli and melty cheese and garlic.

Jyondre: “As treasures go, this is minor, though it looks quite tasty.”

Yerenthax: “Perhaps it is the fearsome foe we are supposed to face, and not the treasure?”

So Jyondre defeated a sandwich in single combat, using his bare fangs as if he were a Gormoror man, and thereby moved Yerenthax to poetic excess:

Yerenthax: “Both sandwich subtle and brocco bold / lose to my lover. I am not cold.”

They explored a few more tunnels, and were greeted by trays of berries and chocolates, by steaming bowls of bouillabaise, by casseroles of stewed nuts and legumes.

Jyondre: “This is all very foody. I wonder if the upper tunnels are different?”

So the primes climbed, and passed into the upper tunnels of the central pyramid. Where they were greeted by a large table covered with a triangular grid, with pawns of two colors and fifteen varieties placed at the grid points. Some segments of the board were covered with little tents, and many others had cards face-down at them, or small stacks of counters in ivory, malachite, or carnelian. A disembodied voice started explaining the rules of the game in Common. Oddly, it’s a cooperative game: the goal is to get pairs of pawns to the tent-concealed locations simultaneously.

Yerenthax: “That’s OK … we’re just looking.”

Voice: “Thou mayst look as thou wilt!”

The Discussion of the Golden Pyramids

Phaniet: “O Elfimel, we have heard there is a realm or chamber in Heaven in which there are many golden pyramids. Know you of such a place?”

Elfimel б: “Oh! It is the chamber of Golden Pyramids!”

Elfimel д: “Why of course! Where else could one find golden pyramids, save in the chamber of Golden Pyramids?”

Grinwipey: “Well, that’s thezz-shundering logic for you.”

Phaniet: “Can you tell us anything about the chamber of Golden Pyramids?”

Elfimel ю: “There are pyramids there! They are made of gold!”

Grinwipey: “It’s for this kind of degleggeratingly brilliant insight that I have travelled from one universe to another to find, y’know? It’s just there’s nothing like it, for how clear it is. Clear as a telescope with spinach, olive and bacon stuffed pizzas for lenses, it is.”

Elfimel б: “Oh! There are board games there! We play them by twos, threes, fours, sixes, eights, elevens, and twelves!”

Este: “No ten-player games?”

Elfimel ю: “No — of course not! Who ever heard of playing ten-player games among the Golden Pyramids?”

Phaniet: “I will admit that I have heard of many, many things, but never a ten-player game among the Golden Pyramids.”

Grinwipey: “Is the food safe to eat there, or will it tie your nuggle-bubbins in knurgle-knots?”

Elfimel ю: “All the foods that Heaven provides are safe and wholesome.”

Elfimel д: “And delicious!”

Elfimel ю: “And do not cause any sort of unpleasant side effects or noxious byproducts!”

Elfimel ч: “A bit too complicated, in that room. I prefer the ones that are only one kind of food. Like these fruits.”

Elfimel ю: “They are the very gift of Mircannis! You must receive them with thanks and happiness!”

Elfimel ч: “I try to, really I do, but I don’t actually think broccoli and melted cheese go together…”

Elfimel ю: “Foish! All these foods are the foods of Heaven! You must relish them all — they are sacred and exquisite!”

Elfimel ч: “You’re being annoying and mean! I hate you! I hope I find you in the Lights and Daggers phase! I don’t even want to be your mother next time! I hate you and hate you and hate you!” She ran off, and was quickly lost among the trees.

Elfimel ю: “What a pest! It’s just as if she tried to pull my fur out with her own teeth! I can’t endure when people behave like that!” She ran off in a different direction.

Phaniet: “That seemed a bit, well, bitter.”

Elfimel б: “Oh, foish! If we’ve got a little disagreement that we can’t settle quickly, usually the people who disagree will just shout at each other like that, and run off, and never see each other again. So it’s OK! We don’t have to resolve conflicts, the way you do. Heaven does it for us!”

Phaniet: “What if you want to resolve a conflict?”

Elfimel б: “Then go right ahead! You’re perfectly allowed to!”

Fountains

At length they departed from the chamber of Golden Pyramids, and came to the chamber of Fountains.

It had, well, fountains. Lots and lots of fountains. Fountains spraying water. Fountains spraying milk. Fountains spraying wine.

Jyondre: “I have never seen so many fountains in one place, nor such a variety.”

Yerenthax: “Nope. Me neither.”

Jyondre: “This is kind of boring.”

Yerenthax: “There’s the door to the next chamber.”

Phaniet: “Can you tell us anything about Fountains?”

Elfimel ӻ: “I can tell you everything about the Fountains!”

Phaniet: “Please do!”

Elfimel ӻ: “”They’re wet! If your fur has gotten dirty somehow — some fruit from Large Fruit, or some blood from Lights and Knives, or any such thing — the Fountains is a place you can go to wash it off. Also, in the waters of the fountains you may catch a large aquatic isopod for a snack, if you wish!

Este: “Yuck, live isopods in your bath!”

Elfimel ӻ: “They aren’t so terrible!”

Phaniet: “That’s all? No compulsions to indulge in erotic play or anything?” She was rather suspicious at this point; Heaven was making her uneasy. Me, too.

Elfimel ӻ: “Nothing like that! I mean, sometimes people do, but usually we go to the fountains afterwards to clean up.”

Thin Petals

Imagine a garden. A flower garden. A flower garden with really really big flowers, and an insane variety of varieties, too. Now take away the plants, leaving the flowers growing in the soil themselves. That’s Thin Petals.

Jyondre: “I’ll bet that the petals are delicious, but have some odd side effect.”

Yerenthax: “When we have explored fully, we shall taste of them! Not now.”

Jyondre: “Rightie-o.”

Phaniet: “And what about the other flower garden, the one with stemless flowers in it?”

Elfimel क: “It’s just a flower garden.”

Phaniet: “No magical euphoric aphrodesiac petals?”

Elfimel क: “No. They taste nice.”

Elfimel ट: “I always wind up getting grabbed by two other Elfimel and stuffed in that big tight flower by the temple door and having sex ’til I can get away.”

Elfimel क: “Oh … there is usually someone being an everyone-toy over there. I don’t think that’s the garden’s fault though. I think that’s because some Elfimel enjoy it.”

Elfimel ट: “I don’t enjoy it! I wish they’d stop doing it!”

Elfimel क: “Stay away from that corner, maybe?”

Elfimel ट: “Where’s the excitement in that? Sometimes I get away from them and they grab someone else.”

Elfimel क: “Sure!”

Grinwipey: “When I hear tell of people playing grab-and-grobble games, I don’t think it’s a proper Heaven, I’ll tell you that much anyhow!”

Comments

[rowyn]

Yay! Heaven has games! And a variety of foods! That notches it up at least two places on my Heaven-scale. :)

Elfimel ट is sending some mixed messages, there. Hee!

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Elfimel may not entirely be the ditzy innocents they appear at first. Or, they may be hideously bored ditzy innocents, which I think is an utterly volatile combination.

[rowyn]

I'm pretty sure I'd be hideously bored if I'd lived for hundreds of thousands of cycles in a world with only 895 other people and which could be crossed in its entirety in a matter of several hours.

[stormydragon.livejournal.com]

Innocents are, in their natural state, often casually and visciously cruel.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Lord of the Flies? >_>

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

Humans have a variety of selfish imperatives wired into their genome; without being socialized, those nasty instincts can rise to the surface(thus Lord of the Flies). With entities that are created to share this space for, as far as can be told, eternity, with all their material needs provided for, it may well be otherwise.

[kris-schnee.livejournal.com]

Eating food you find lying around in a dungeon is actually standard adventurer practice. Just don't shoot it.

[stormydragon.livejournal.com]

It's too late. You've woken up the sandwhich, and it catches you and eats you.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Vengeance!

[arenhaus.livejournal.com]

Try to roll for a fire mage this time.

[greenreaper.livejournal.com]

And cheese and broccoli is a lot better than a slime mould in my book.

[relee.livejournal.com]

I have seen a cheese and broccoli slime mould but never eaten one.

[ionotter.livejournal.com]

Hmmmmmmmm.

Pardon, but exactly where can I find this "big tight flower" again? By the Temple door, you say?

>.>

<.<

=^.^=

[gavinfox.livejournal.com]

Pyramids... made of Gold.

Gold plated or solid gold?

Whatever, it doesn't matter. Should still be crazy valuable; gold is a very useful in certain types of constructed objects, is easy to work, and beautiful metal, and should be really expensive wherever you are...

Maybe you all should ask some kind of permanent, durable keepsakes from this place to ah, show the people in your world something from this wonderful heaven?

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

You're an adventurer, right?

[gavinfox.livejournal.com]

Well... lets just say that I'm familiar with the idea of Adventuring...

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

I'm an adventurer (Family Motto: 'We don't have trips, we have adventures!') and as one, I can tell you, if you see a Large Important Thing made of Something Precious, whatever you do, don't try to defile it! It just makes the natives restless!

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

In my experience, the phrase "don't try to defile it" usually makes things worse.

For example, one might innocently have one's lunch upon one's person... then be told that the בֵּית־הַמִּקְדָּשׁ and a ham sandwich don't mix...

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

There is a difference, though, between performing Sacrilege on accident, and purposefully defacing/removing/being creative with important artifacts. One shouldn't graffiti upon the walls of a Pharaoh's tomb, for example. Nor should one steal the Chip N Dale Bronze from Main Street Square.

[relee.livejournal.com]

This is like the time those adventurers went to the ancient tomb and stole the massive golden doors and called it a day.


Gold is not notably valuable on the planet made of gold, or on the dimension of gold. It's not especially valuable on the dimension of deep mines either because even though it's not as plentiful as on the planet made of gold or the dimension of gold, it is still plentiful to the point of excess. There, you would likely find more value in the sandwiches. Sandwiches are less valuable in the dimension of gold however because people there don't eat sandwiches or like them very much. Just whatever you do, don't take the dimension of the sandwich people.

[relee.livejournal.com]

Hmm... I wonder what the carpet is made out of in Golden Pyramids. The stone and gold are nice and all but the decadence of a carpet that extends throughout a chamber of that scale seems far more interesting to me.


Hmm... It occurs to me that everburning torches of sandalwood and myrrh would have to recycle the scent-particles or else they would coat everything with them and eventually fill the universe, or in some way recycle matter. It's more difficult than everburning torches because those just transform magic into conventional energy, which eventually gets turned back into magic later on. Matter takes far too long to turn back in to magic to be practical or safe.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

They might be purely illusion-based torches. You can make an illusion of scent as easily as an illusion of light and heat, generally.

Or if the magic there doesn't let illusionary light illuminate the real world, it could be real light with illusionary scent still? That would be more complicated.

[relee.livejournal.com]

Well, there are different kinds of illusions. I mean, you can't have the illusion of light without there being light. You need light to see an illusion. You can make an illusionary torch that doesn't require light, by having it project the image of the area as it would appear lit into the minds of those who see it, but that's serious overkill and complicates things for people with high magic resistance or extrasensory perception.

You are right about the illusionary smell, that might work, though it would be kind of cheap for a godly realm.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

The illusionary torch that tries to project the area as it would appear lit into your mind was used as an example of why 'light' in D+D needed to be errata'd to use evocation. Otherwise you'd see what you expected to see, or what the person who cast the spell wanted you to see, and not what was actually there.

...which made it wonderful for traps. You have a dark cave 'well lit by torches' so the party doesn't bother lighting their own, and then OMG they get attacked by 'invisible' monsters! And never see the passages you want hidden. And fall in lots of pits.

[relee.livejournal.com]

Well I guess I shouldn't be surprised that this has come up before, but I'm sort of surprised you're so well versed on the subject.

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

Another notion of illusion, though, is not purely a mental effect(which it also would not be on World Tree - that's Mentador), but instead is very much a construct of light(and other sensory cues; sound is as ephemeral as light, so is easy, while touch, taste, and smell have to echo a physical thing). Now, on WT, pure light isn't Illusidor either(it's primarily Pyrador), but you could probably affect it somewhat with a Vb Il Py spell, just as rain is a phenomenon of both Airador and Aquador.

Illusory torches with illusory fires, on the World Tree, would shed very real light. They might even feel hot if you burn them, and your mind could infer that you ought to be hurt - if the illusion is really good(probably mindful), it might even make the appearance of charred fur and flesh. In truth, you're still fine(illusory damage will never kill you, though the accumulated pain may make it difficult to act effectively), but illusions as the World Tree knows them are not all in your head(though some aftereffects of them may well be).

Of course, you could craft illusions in that manner using Mutoc Mentador, but it would be much less practical. Not only are fewer people practised in it, but it wouldn't have Illusidor's quirk of being harder to notice at higher power, rather than easier - unless you use Illusidor anyway. The only benefit to doing it that way would be if you have a knack in Mentador - illusions can be personal without being Mentador effects.(cf Beaker Dripping Scorn, which, cast with Destroc, masks its own effects from the subject)

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

Addendum: I say this mostly to establish precedent. One of the realms (co-)governed my Mircannis uses these rules; it is not unreasonable to act on the assumption that another run by her also does.

[waywind.livejournal.com]

Not cheap-- efficient!

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Or the air of Heaven is periodically healed. Mircannis does that sort of thing, you know.

[stormydragon.livejournal.com]

I nominate 'healing the air of Heaven' as a new euphemism for breaking wind.

[relee.livejournal.com]

And now we know why even the Elfimel's little poops are cute.

[stormydragon.livejournal.com]

It occured to me today: these Elfmiel seem very upset that Mircannis and Lenhirik don't talk to them anymore. While there's not much you can do about Mircannis, you could offer to take them to Lennhirik.

[gavinfox.livejournal.com]

Do they even know where Lennhirik is?

[stormydragon.livejournal.com]

Well, last we heard, she'd spent 40 years as a wood statue in the middle a particular forest in Kenetheria.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

[That's as of 4260 -- 125 years ago. No comment on whether she still is in Sythyry's timeline.]

[stormydragon.livejournal.com]

Well, maybe a visit from her old minions could be the thing that actually wakes her up.

[zeeth_kyrah]

Also if I was Thefefy, I would be annoyed that Mircannis isn't taking care of her own creations properly, so that they had to petition me as spirits in order to restart the population.

I rather suspect that the missing four Elfimel have defected to some new location, and inhabitants have been banned from speaking of them.

[stormydragon.livejournal.com]

I had a thought that maybe this heaven was kinda an audition project to get onto the World Tree project. Mircannis and Lenhirik got picked to join the new team. Thefefy didn't make the cut and got left behind.

[yotogi.livejournal.com]

You know, there are times I start to think Grinwipey may be the sanest of the lot.

[stormydragon.livejournal.com]

It's easy to sound wise when everything you say is too cryptic to understand. It's kinda the contrapositive of the old Twain line about "it's better to remain silent and appear a fool then to open your mouth and remove all doubt"

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

Obfuscation can be as good as silence(or invisibility), sometimes.

[alex-muridae.livejournal.com]

A fuzzwaddin' lotta good that'll do, when the way you dance on tails 'n knot the air is just as exhumerating about yer ol' granite balloon. Nah, s'better to let'em think you're all woobly and twineshootin'; makes 'em less twisteyed about yer floatin' upside their upside for the mombo'a tripple-wood.

[I'm tempted to translate here, but that would rather spoil the fun.] :3