“Well, that was abrupt,” Nathan said abruptly, after his stepping through the door resulted in an abrupt transition to an open, grassy field. “I’d say it was disorienting, but it… somehow wasn’t?”
“It always is,” Tanya said with a shrug. The motion clanked, armored as she was, and the muscles of her neck bunched in tension that then bled out as she deliberately relaxed. Her hand twitched as if to reach for her sword, then opened spasmodically. “Abrupt. And not disorienting, which is always weird. But you get used to that.”
“You get used to the fact that it’s weird,” Nathan repeated slowly for confirmation’s sake, “in how not disorienting it is?”
“Yep!” Honeydew Dream Brilliant-Flower-Opening-Softly smiled softly, a smile broad enough to twist at her eyes and induce ache in her jaw. It was the beatific smile of someone who’d had an intensely fulfilling experience the night before and then gotten a good night’s sleep—it was the smile of someone who could easily be described as floating up into the clouds, though such a description would be potentially misleading for a powerful sorceress.
She was, after all, only floating some few inches off of the ground. And even that was entirely due to the fact that she was absent-minded enough to not notice; were she more aware of it, she would have tried to stop on account of the mild rudeness of the act.
She would have almost immediately forgotten about it afterwards, but she would have tried. And truly, since she would have tried, could anyone possibly have criticized her?
Nathan shook his head as Honeydew’s attention floated elsewhere. There wasn’t much to be looking at, which made it even more impressive to him that her gaze wandered into the vaguely uninteresting blue sky and the open sea of slightly differentiated grasses as she turned, her dress flaring and drawing her partner’s eyes.
The young man who’d joined the two of them had already switched to looking around curiously, seeing nothing to concern himself with in the antics of his new adventuring party. The area wasn’t exactly realistic, but it wasn’t trying for realism—it was aiming to not be actively disconcerting, and it did a bit better than that. And that was interesting in its own right to him, because it meant that there was a degree of function in the form of aesthetic sensibility married with a certain amount of laziness and desire to not spend too much in the way of power.
“So, is there anything here other than that… plinth isn’t right. It’s too short to be an obelisk and too tall to be a cairn. Pillar? Or pillar?” He frowned, iterating through words which had no equivalent in English and which he would have had to substitute one word for, rather than enumerating a set of different words, were he trying to convey the moment he was experiencing as though he were writing a narrative. “No, this is definitely a pillar. That first word is too unworked and the second one is too abstract.”
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“Linguist, huh?”
“No.” Nathan snorted and shook his head at Tanya’s remark. “I know theoretically I was supposed to be, as a nerd and all, but I actually didn’t care about languages. They’re just… tools. We use them to communicate. I didn’t know much about how a jigsaw worked, y’know?”
“Then how—right.” She shook her head, sighing. “That language ability of yours is kinda even more bullshit for someone who doesn’t care. I know people who’d vivisect a civilization in a heartbeat to have your level of knowledge about their language.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Nathan mostly ignored her as he walked towards the pillar, squinting against the alternating patterns of radiance and darkness that it was emitting. “Why is that thing blinking in a longs-and-shorts pattern? It’s like it’s some sort of binary code.”
Honey bounded up behind him, proving that no matter how scatterbrained she might have seen, she was still listening to him and generally paying attention. “What’s it saying? This might be a puzzle!”
“SH CRIMSON MOON SHINES EARTH SHATTERS MESSAGE REPEATS STARS FALLING FISH CRIMSON…” Nathan trailed off, still walking towards the pillar. “The rest of the message just repeats, yeah. I wonder…”
The other two let him think, but he didn’t have much to work on as he approached. It was five feet tall, a smooth-sided pentagon with shapes scribed onto the black stone and filled in with thin lines of white and gray. Despite the near-monochrome of it, it still managed to give a sense of depth and three-dimensionality to the scenes depicted.
“I don’t… know much about what they intend here,” he murmured. “I mean, obviously the moon is shining, that’s sort of what it does, well, not always, what’s a new moon after all? So maybe a moon shining is a full moon, or maybe the moon shining means something with the vectors of the sun, there’s really no way to know.” His hands nudged the pillar and it slid smoothly under his touch, rotating in sections to present different faces of the pentagon. He forgot immediately what the original position of them was as he played with them, almost as though he were fidgeting. “And what even is stars falling supposed to mean? Like, there aren’t any shooting stars here, and those aren’t stars anyway. And it’s not like the stars ever fall, it’s the planet that rotates around its, you know, axis of rotation, but maybe it’s poetic license. And earth shatters? I guess there’s volcanos? Iceland gets a lot of those. They handle them really well, though. Like, volcano pops up next to your house, good thing you had seismic sensors and great volcanology, you already built a berm, good job, now you have a new geothermal plant or whatever? I just feel like that’s a great example of solving collective action problems. God forbid we apply that to the NodeJS supply chain, we might make the hackers sad.”
And with one last rotation of one of its pentagonal sections, the pillar grew into a door.