013

The Warming Blossom

Vaughan gently laid the poor, shivering dryad into a bed next to a cold fireplace. With a flick of his wrist, the wood within burst into flames, bringing the temperature of the room up considerably.

Blue ran in with an arcane heater, handing it off to Jeh so she could add even more heat to the scene.

“H-hey…” Sandy managed from the bed. “I don’t want to wilt here…” She found her own joke amusing enough to let out a chuckle, which must have caused her pain as her mirth ended abruptly and she shut her eyes tightly. “Mmmf…”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get you anything you need.” Blue pulled open the curtains with her telekinesis, letting sunlight in. “Do you, uh… eat anything?”

Jeh rolled her eyes. “Dryads can’t survive on just sunlight. They like fruit.”

Blue blinked. “And you know this… how?”

Jeh pointed at Vaughan. “He’s got a lot of books.”

“Oh. Uh, well, we have a lot of frostweed… and oats. And I suppose sunflower seeds from my experiments?”

Sandy smiled warmly. “Anything will be fine. Even meat. We…” She paused to catch her breath. “…We are not strictly vegetarians.”

Blue frowned. “Neither am I, and I know my response to being served steak.”

“Please… I don’t want to be any trouble…”

Vaughan laid a hand on the side of the bed. “You need to stop talking and rest. I don’t know what the effects of frostbite on a dryad are…”

Blue nudged him in the ribs. “You’ll be fine, Sandy, you’re safe here. Okay?”

Sandy nodded, closing her eyes. “ ‘Kay…” She took in a much larger breath than she had before and said nothing further.

Everyone understood that they needed to remain quiet until Jeh brought the temperature of the room up enough, at which point the three of them snuck out and went to the main hall.

Vaughan flopped onto the couch. “What is a free leaf dryad doing all the way out here?”

“Free leaf?” Blue asked.

“The ones that don’t turn into trees. They don’t get that tall naturally.”

“…It occurs to me that I don’t know very much about dryads. I’ve never even seen one, just heard about them.”

Jeh raised her hand. “Ooh! Ooh! I’ve read a lot about them!”

“Anything that would explain what one was doing out in the middle of winter, alone?”

“Uh…” Jeh put her hand to her chin. “No. They actually don’t do well in the cold. Pretty sure they aren’t that bushy, either. I think she’s grown extra plants on herself to keep warm.”

Blue frowned. “How is she still alive? It’s not an easy walk to the next town without snow everywhere.”

“Maybe there’s a Glen in the forest?” Vaughan asked.

Jeh folded her arms. “I’d know if there was a Glen in this forest.”

“You absolutely sure?”

Jeh’s confident demeanor wavered slightly. “Not… absolutely. It’s possible if they hid it. The books say underground ones do exist…”

“We’ll just have to wait for her to wake up at this point,” Blue said. “Answers will come.”

“If she doesn’t wilt away due to frostbite,” Jeh added.

“Jeh! That’s… wait, you are the child. Whose innocence am I trying to protect here?”

Jeh shrugged. “I dunno. I hope she makes it, though, she looks interesting.”

Vaughan laid down on the couch, letting out a deep sigh. “Today’s been… quite a day, huh?”

Jeh wiped her brow. “Yep! Thanks for playing!”

Blue patted her on the head. “Don’t mention it. We had fun too. Now, uh, we can’t do that every day, we do have things to do. Even you, Jeh. I’m going to try to find some experiments you can help run, if possible.”

“R-really?”

“Really. Now, though…” Blue yawned. “I want to flop into a bed.”

“I’m not moving from this couch,” Vaughan said.

“Future you’s back will suffer.”

Vaughan gave a noncommittal gesture and pulled his hat over his eyes.

Blue rolled her eyes. “Jeh, don’t be like Vaughan.”

“Don’t be a moron?”

“Exactly, good girl. Go sleep in good, soft, comfortable places.”

“…Trees?”

Blue blinked a few times. “I’m too tired for this game the three of us play. Good night.”

“Good night!” Jeh waved. “…I think I’ll go eat something.”

After her frostweed snack, she passed right out on a chair opposite Vaughan. Neither of them made it to their respective beds that night.

~~~

The next day, Vaughan, Blue, and Jeh sat around the breakfast table, silently eating their oatmeal. Every few moments, one of them would glance toward the stairs, down which lay the guest room, where a very particular dryad was still sleeping.

“This is ridiculous,” Jeh said, standing up suddenly. “I’m going to go check on her.”

“I already did that,” Blue said. “She was still sleeping. With the fake cat ears still on.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Considering that you and Vaughan didn’t wake up until the unholy hour of eleven… quite a while ago.”

Vaughan carefully stood up, taking a moment to creak his back. “Egh…”

“Told you so,” Blue deadpanned. “Anyway, I guess we should probably go check on her.” She glanced outside at the sun. “Breakfast in the afternoon…”

Vaughan led the trio down to Sandy’s room. He gently knocked on the door.

“C-come in,” a weak voice said from the other side.

The three of them shuffled in. The fire had burned down, but the room was still significantly warmer than the rest of the cabin. Sandy herself was still in bed, though she had her head tilted so she could look right at them with a warm smile.

“Thank you for… all this,” Sandy said. “But I am afraid I…” she took a moment to gather herself. “I must ask for your further hospitality. I am in… no condition to do much of anything.”

“You can stay as long as you want,” Vaughan said with a curt nod. “I would not send anyone out into that cold.” He kneeled down so he could be eye-level with her reclining form. “I… do not know much about dryads. I don’t know your condition.”

“It is… not good.” Sandy closed her eyes. “But I will live.”

“If you don’t mind me asking…” Blue stepped forward. “Why were you even out there?”

“I… was on a balloon-whale, heading for Port Jominir. There must have been some volatile arcane device in the cargo hold, since everything exploded.” She shivered, but not from the cold. “I came to in a pine tree somewhere in your woods… I’m afraid I have no idea where it is in relation to here. I tried to find civilization and…” She took a moment for a few breaths. “Well, I found you. Barely.”

“Do you think there are any other survivors?” Blue asked.

“I don’t know…” Sandy said. “I know I was the only civilian passenger, the rest were crew and… weird cargo specialists.” She closed her eyes, letting out a few short breaths that may have been an attempt at laughter. “Shoulda known it was a bad sign when the ticket was so cheap…”

“I hope you didn’t have anything important to do in Port Jominir,” Vaughan said with a shake of his head. “There aren’t any balloon-whale berths for…”

“An absurd distance,” Blue finished. “We have to rely on messengers out here.”

“It… is fine.” Sandy closed her eyes. “I was just meeting some people, they’ll understand if I’m delayed. Things happen, especially in… winter.”

“Can I ask a question?” Jeh asked.

Sandy did the soft laugh again. “You just did.”

“Oh. Can I ask one after this one?”

“Yes.”

“What’s with the cat ears?”

Sandy broke out into a grin. “Oh, I just like cats.” Shakily, she lifted one of her arms out of the covers—the limb was still absolutely surrounded in bushy leaves—and removed the cat ears from her head. They were just pieces of stuffed felt on a headband. “I think they look neat. Back home, I actually have one of those… non-spirited cats. Her name’s Fufuffer.”

“You must not live in Kroan,” Vaughan said.

Sandy nodded. “Vraskalian, born and raised.”

“Vraskal…” Vaughan scratched his beard. “Vraskal…”

“Really, really far away,” Jeh answered. “Across the ocean.”

Sandy’s eyes locked on Jeh. “Wow... you know a lot for your age.”

“I read a lot of Vaughan’s books. I also have to study the maps very closely so I know where to land.”

“Land…?”

Vaughan scratched his beard. “We have a little… project here we call the Wizard Space Program. Our goal is to discover how high we can go. Currently, we think that’s the moon.”

“I have my doubts about that,” Blue interjected. “There are so many issues and I can’t even get the flight path down!”

“Okay, well, the moon is our current goal.” Vaughan tipped his hat.

Sandy blinked a few times. “I wonder… why no one else has tried going ‘up’ before…”

“Not much up there past a certain point,” Vaughan said.

“It’s also extremely dangerous!” Jeh said. “Without me, they wouldn’t be going anywhere!”

“Oh?”

“I have the best regeneration attribute-kinda-thingy ever. Oooh, I could show you! Blue, can I have a knife?”

Blue facehooved. “Jeh, you are not stabbing yourself in front of our guest.”

“Aww…”

Sandy glanced between the three of them quizzically. “I’m sure… I’ll get plenty of opportunities to see everything you and your… program has…” She let out a sigh. “But I am still weak. I… may need more than a few days to recover.”

“You’ll need to stay longer than that,” Vaughan said. “This snow’s lasting until at least the tail-end of winter.”

“I couldn’t possibly stay that long…”

Vaughan held up a hand. “If it makes you feel better, I’ll kick you out once the snow melts.”

Sandy couldn’t help but laugh at that one—an act that made her wince slightly. “G-good…” She closed her eyes and put the cat ears back on. “I… I’d like some lunch. And then… sleep.”

“Right away,” Blue said, scampering off to go prepare something in the kitchen.

“And… thank you,” Sandy said. “There are those who would have left me out there.”

“Not around here,” Vaughan said.

“Mmm…” Sandy kept her eyes closed. When Blue returned with a frostweed salad she set it gently on the end table next to Sandy for when she woke up. Once again, the three of them left the room, leaving her to rest.

~~~

Days passed. Things returned to some semblance of normal, albeit a normal that had existed before the snow came. Blue worked in her lab a large chunk of the day but always made sure to come out at least for mealtimes, Vaughan made sure he wasn’t idle, and Jeh drifted back and forth between play and helping them whenever it was possible. Vaughan had even started to teach her more fine-tuned magic use: Jeh was a bit of a brute-force wizard in spellcasting style.

On this particular day, Jeh was working with Vaughan on increasing Red skill, so Blue was left alone in her lab to run her calculations.

Rolls upon rolls of paper were strewn everywhere, absolutely covered in mathematical notation, numbers, and scratched out equations that led to nothing. However, there was something to show for her progress: on one of the walls she’d hung up almost a hundred models of the Ikyu-moon system, each one with a dot representing the current location of a hypothetical “ship” and its path of travel. These images ended with a single image that showed the total path of the “ship” as well as the starting and ending locations of the moon. There was also a little note to indicate how much Ikyu itself had rotated.*

*Some might think it odd that Blue is already taking it as a given that Ikyu rotates while not considering that it orbits the sun. This actually mirrors the debate in our history over the nature of the Earth in the cosmos. Ancient philosophers argued about if the stars orbited Earth or if the Earth just rotated. Several models existed that had a geocentric rotating Earth model. The reason we were stuck so long with a motionless earth largely has to do with Aristotle believing it to be so, and everyone just “knew” that everything Aristotle had said was always right. Which it largely wasn’t.

On Ikyu, the historical experiment to prove Ikyu’s rotation has already occurred. It’s much easier to make a free-floating pendulum with arcane devices and watch it change as Ikyu rotates. The Orange wizard in question who ran it was a gari by the name of Riganel Boridan, and he was obsessed with levitation, which naturally led to the development of a nearly-perfect pendulum device. The Kroan Academy actually has one set up to run permanently, which is used as a demonstration of the power of magical inquiry as well as the best clock ever. Proper clockwork clocks are extremely new, however.

It is considered to be a rather pitiable position to be the wizard on duty at the pendulum, constantly feeding will into it to make sure it doesn’t lose its precision.

Most of Blue’s models were either messes that crashed into Ikyu or the moon, while others just flew off the page into nothingness. However, many were showing a curve to the flight trajectory that was driving Blue insane. How was she supposed to compensate for that while also guaranteeing her speed would match the moon’s at the end?

“Geeeeh…” Blue slammed her face into her desk. The noise was so loud it made Sandy let out an “eep!” from her position in the doorway.

Blue suddenly stood up and used her telekinesis to pull her disheveled mane back. “Oh, uh, Sandy, hi! …Should you be out of bed?”

Sandy was completely wrapped up in several blankets, leaving only her face visible through the fluffy bundles. “I… needed to walk. I think I’m fine.” She was a little shaky, but she managed to make it to the chair Vaughan kept in the lab and sit down. “What… is this place?”

“This is my lab,” Blue said. “Right now it’s mostly math, but you can see some of the old plant experiments in those jars over there.”

Sandy turned to the jars. “They look… mostly dead.”

“We experiment on how plants react to a lack of air in different situations. Or, well, we were. There’s no air in space, so we kind of needed to know how it worked.”

“No air…? Interesting.”

“Well, there’s still some, but not enough for us to breathe. And… actually, you’re a plant, right?”

Sandy smiled softly. “Yes, dryads are plants through and through. We eat the light of the sun.”

“Do you know anything about how you breathe?”

“Not… really? I’m not a wizard.”

Blue nodded. “It’s fine. I didn’t know about how I breathed until running these tests, anyway.”

“So… if those are your old experiments…” Sandy turned to the images on the wall. “What are you working on now?”

“This is Ikyu, and that is the moon. All of these are me trying to figure out how to fly there. Each drawing is a different moment in time, and that dot is the ship.”

“They look kind of pretty.”

“They may look nice but all of these end in terrible things, or crashes, or almost-crashes that I don’t feel safe recommending.” Blue paused. “Would… you like to see me create one?”

“Sure!”

Blue took out a blank piece of paper, laying it down on the desk. Taking a pen in her telekinesis, she drew Ikyu and a small arrow. “This is Ikyu and how much it’s rotated since the first drawing over there. The next thing I do is find out where the moon’s going to be…” She took out a compass and a protractor, measured an angle, drew a dot on the page, and made a circle around that. “The previous dot was moving at a certain speed in a certain direction, so I just multiply the speed by the time-interval I’m using and find the new location of the dot.” She marked it on the sheet. “Unfortunately, I don’t know how fast it’s going now. If the ship isn’t doing any ‘pushing,’ the calculation is somewhat simple. Take into account the tendency for objects to fall to Ikyu…” On a separate sheet of paper, she scribbled some numbers down and a quick angle diagram to figure out how the acceleration of falling would change the resultant speed. “…Aaaaand there we go! I now have a new speed value I can use for the next sheet. I can adjust the power of the ship as I want to ‘change course.’ “

“Wow. That… looks hard.”

“Each individual step isn’t all that hard. Trying to figure out what path is the best one is. I mean, the moon’s moving, Ikyu’s turning, the ship has so many options on where it can go…” She levitated the sheet up to the wall with the others in the series. “And if we trace ourselves from where we started, we…” Blue’s eyes widened. “Wait a second.”

“What is it?”

“I think I may have just found something.” She grabbed a new sheet of paper and, very hastily, traced out the path of the “ship” she was currently working with. At the start, it had a bunch of erratic motions because she was trying to change its course a lot, but after that she just let it drift naturally to see what would happen because she’d been a little bored.

It had, with no input from the ship’s “force,” gone three-fourths of the way around Ikyu. Extrapolating from the elliptical curve that had been created, she made a loop.

A loop that, if she’d done her math correctly, would continue indefinitely with no interference from anyone. Ever.

“A stable path…”

“That sounds good.” Sandy blinked. “That’s good, right?”

“It’s very good.” Blue grinned. “If I work with these kinds of loops… I’ll need to run more calculations but this could be very good! Ha!”

“I’m… glad for you! I think.”

“And—oh my gosh this might even explain why the moon travels in a circle. Or the planets! …Wait the planets have that—never mind, that’s something to figure out later! There’s math to be done!”

Sandy decided now it was time to leave Blue to her excited ramblings. She curtly left the lab and closed the door behind her. With a deep breath, she headed back to her bed.

~~~

It took a whole day, but Blue finally had some results to show everyone. It happened at lunchtime. Sandy wasn’t present, as she hadn’t left her room that day.

“So!” Blue said. “I think I have a way we can get to the moon without crashing into it.”

“Oh?” Vaughan asked.

“I’ve discovered something.” She lifted up one of her pages that showed an elliptical path around Ikyu. “You’re all familiar with my diagrams at this point.”

“Why would we want to fly around?” Jeh asked. “I thought we wanted to go to the moon!”

“This is the shape I found when I turned the ship’s drive off. There is no ‘pushing’ occurring. The ship will follow this path forever unless something interferes with it. It’s stable! And, tweaking it a bit…” She took out a few more diagrams, showing circular paths around Ikyu at various elevations. “I can make circles. Guys, we can orbit Ikyu. Without a drive, even, if we got going fast enough!”

“How fast?”

“Absolutely absurd speeds,” Blue said. “I’ll get to it in a minute, there are some… discrepancies in the data, but with this discovery, I think we can manually correct.” She unfolded a much larger sheet of paper with a more detailed design. “Here is my proposal. First, we get out of the atmosphere.” She gestured at the small path that lifted up off Ikyu. “Then we blast off at an angle.” She used the back of the pen to follow a large arc that swept widely around Ikyu. “And we gradually increase our slope until we get to here.” She stopped at a point. “This is only a few thousand kilometers from the moon. Once we’re here, we transition into an orbit—specifically, this elliptical one here.” She gestured to a dotted ellipse path that went around Ikyu. “Then we wait for the moon to arrive when we pass near its orbit. We’ll both be going at alarmingly fast speeds around Ikyu, which means we can compensate. And, because our orbit doesn’t intersect with the moon’s, we can stay there as long as we want until we are confident in our transition to the moon’s speed. At which point we maneuver ourselves in front of the Moon’s flight path so it can push us along while we collect samples.”

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

Blue took a moment to bow. “And that is what I’ve been working on all winter.”

“This is definitely a start,” Vaughan said with a nod. “Surely you’ll need the actual ship plans before finalizing it, right?”

“Not necessarily. See, the curious thing is that the stable orbits don’t care how heavy the object is.” She threw out another sheet of paper. “No matter how heavy I made the ship, the orbits remain the same. It becomes harder to push the ship, but the orbits don’t care.” She paused. “There is one thing that throws a wrench into all this, though.”

“What’s that?” Jeh asked.

“I figured it was reasonable to assume that ‘hey, maybe the moon is in an orbit around Ikyu!’ and so I did the math. Unfortunately, a stable orbit at the moon’s location should be moving at a speed of sixty kilometers per second, not one.” Blue tapped her hoof. “It’s really annoying; I wouldn’t have had to find this weird elliptical path if the moon moved like my calculations say we will. This makes me think that really large things interact differently with the tendency to fall.”

“All of the celestial objects are of immense size,” Vaughan said. “You might be on to something.”

“Yes. Problem is, we can’t exactly perform tests on the really large objects. All we have are small things. Even the largest dragons still fall at the same rate as everything else we know, no matter where they are or how high they are.”

Jeh pointed at the dot just outside the atmosphere. “So if I got here-ish, how fast do I have to go to orbit?”

“About eight kilometers a second directly perpendicular to the surface of Ikyu.”

“That’s… wow that’s really fast.”

“Yes—again, the moon must have some different rule because of how large it is that we can’t discern.”

“Maybe we can find out by going there,” Vaughan suggested.

“That’s the idea! The very stupid but looking-more-possible-by-the-day idea!” Blue grinned. “Anyway, with stable orbits at our disposal, suddenly it’s a lot less dangerous. We can enter one and take our time without any fear of smashing into something headfirst.”

“How would we make those calculations while in flight, though?” Vaughan said. “As Jeh pointed out, it’s hard to tell where we are.”

Blue grinned. “I figured that out a while ago. We can use the relative size of Ikyu and the moon. We’d just need a precise measure of length we can press to a window. From that, we can figure out with some error how far we are from Ikyu and the moon.”

“But the moon never changed size for me,” Jeh said.

“It would have, infinitesimally,” Blue explained. “But if you made it, say, to the halfway point…” She put the back of her pen on the paper. “Then the moon would look much larger and Ikyu much smaller. Here is where we can measure it, finding the relative distance from the moon and Ikyu. There’s a little mathematical annoyance in this method that gives you two possible locations, but if we look at the direction of the moon’s travel we can figure out which one. I can even set up the formula ahead of time so either of you could do it without much problem.”

“Space navigation…” Vaughan grinned. “Why not just navigate by the stars?”

Blue blinked. “I… hmm. Good point, that’d probably work too, but I don’t know how to do that.”

“It would only tell us where we were in relation to Ikyu’s surface, anyway, it wouldn’t tell us elevation.”

“My next mission should be to establish a stable orbit with the Skyseed,” Jeh said.

Vaughan frowned. “Would that be safe?”

“It’d be fast,” Blue said. “If she gets a stable orbit at the height she went to last time, she’d go around Ikyu in about an hour and a half.”

Vaughan blinked. “An hour and a half?”

“Yes?”

“Blue, I think you just invented the most effective way to travel around the world.” Vaughan stood up. “That high up, there’s no air to limit speed. And if you get into this orbit… hmm, all you need is enough Orange to build up the speed and slow down. Or… enough Red, I suppose.”

“Don’t use Blue,” Blue suggested. “I tried modeling Blue usage a few times. It ruins everything and makes it a million times more complicated.”

“Don’t overlook this, Blue! Tiny craft like the Skyseed can be unimaginably useful for travel! No more relying on balloon-whales and weather. You could even travel in… in the midst of a winter snow-in!” He slapped his leg in excitement.

“It would take significantly less energy than getting to the moon…” Blue noted.

“So I get to go around the planet?” Jeh asked.

Blue frowned. “Well, we don’t know what to do about the tiny meteors up there, or how to defend against them. The Skyseed probably isn’t safe for that. Also getting into the orbit would require taking position readings in relation to Ikyu a lot; we’d have to teach you to do that.”

“I’m ready for it!”

“Well… we’ll bring it up with the rest of the Program when we get out of this snow.”

“Blegh, waiting…”

“It sure would be nice if we could communicate with them right now…” Vaughan scratched his beard. “Historically, though, communication devices have had severe limitations. Even if I tried to set up a wire to Willow Hollow, it’d deteriorate very quickly.”

“Communicating with the ship in flight would be even better,” Blue said.

“How?” Vaughan asked. “Magenta needs to be physically present to carry will over distances. Unless you want a 400,000-kilometer-long wire of Magenta, and that’d break before you even got to space. A relay* wouldn’t work either.”

*A relay is a usually non-magical device synonymous with what we would call an “optical telegraph.” It’s a series of towers where people stand and wave flags at each other or shine lights in particular patterns to carry messages over long distances.

“Another thing to figure out…” Blue said. “I’m going to keep working on refining potential paths, though.”

“…Can we have some fun first?” Jeh asked.

Blue stopped for a moment. “Er…”

Jeh rolled her eyes. “It’s fine, go be excited with your math for a day.”

“Thanks!” With that, Blue ran back to her lab, cackling to herself.

Vaughan adjusted his hat. “She really is the perfect girl for the job, isn’t she?”

Jeh nodded in agreement. “Hey, Vaughan, want to try and cook frostweed pie?”

“Sounds terrible, I’m in.”

~~~

Vaughan had discovered very quickly that he liked to work outside. Now that he was inside, the freedom of the outdoors called to him but laughed in his face at the mere suggestion of working out in the snow.

So he had commandeered what was meant to be the cabin’s “living room.” They never used it. The couches in the entryway were much better, anyway, so he’d pushed all the furniture in this room to the edges so he could store his work in here. The Skyseed itself was currently stored here, in one of the corners and under a decent number of sheets.

He was fortunate the living room had double doors that led to the main hall; otherwise, the Skyseed wouldn’t have been able to fit.

Aside from the Skyseed and the furniture, most of the living room was now home to piles of disheveled objects, desks, and crystal shapes. Unlike Blue’s lab, there were very few papers lying around, and those that were there mostly contained hastily scrawled notes to help Vaughan remember things.

Sandy walked through the doors, looking around the massive room with wide eyes—or, at least, Vaughan thought they were wide eyes. It was kind of hard to tell with dryads. She had left the blanket behind on the bed for once and strode into the room at a normal speed, though when she stopped she leaned on one of the couches to catch her breath.

“You look a lot better,” Vaughan said. “At this rate I’ll have to kick you out at any moment!” He winked at her.

Sandy giggled. “You did promise.”

“Good thing it’s still frozen outside and I can’t. Dumb weather, ruining my eviction plans.” He gave her an over-exaggerated shrug.

Sandy absent-mindedly adjusted her cat ears. “So… what are you working on?”

“I want a moon rock,” Vaughan said. “However, getting a sample is tricky when you can’t leave the ship. You want to get it inside so you can run tests on it before you run all the way back to Ikyu, so just having an external pouch you levitate things into won’t do it. Thus, I have come up with this answer!” He gestured at a small, but long wireframe box he’d made out of wood that was devoid of any features. “Imagine that there are glass panes everywhere, and that you couldn’t just stick your hand through the frame.”

“I’m imagining it, don’t worry.”

Vaughan nodded. “Good! Now, let this left side be the inside of the ship…” He placed a Red crystal shaped like a pawn with a wizard hat on its head in the left side of the rectangular prism. “And outside, we have our moon rock!” He placed the micrometeorite Jeh had brought back outside of the wireframe box. “Now, on Ikyu, there’s no issue using Orange to just levitate the sample to where you are.” He levitated the rock through a “hole” in the wireframe to the little red wizard pawn. Technically speaking the hole was just another face of the box, but Sandy got the idea.

“But there’s the problem with air, right? I think Blue was talking about that.”

“Bingo! So, when we’re in space, we seal off the ship.” He slid a pane of wood between the edges of the wireframe, blocking off the imagined “entrance” with sold material. “But now we can’t levitate it through. And if we open the door, whoosh, out goes all our air.”

“Why?”

“Higher pressure likes to go to lower pressure. Don’t ask me why that is, it’s just one of those things we discover when we experiment on air. But there’s virtually no air out there so all the air loves to leave. However… what if we add a second door?” He slid another wooden panel down, maybe a centimeter further in than the first one. “Then we can do this…”

With Orange, he levitated the micrometeorite, opened the first door, moved the micrometeorite between the two wooden panel “doors,” closed the first one, then opened the second. With a flick of his wrist, he threw the micrometeor at the Red pawn, knocking it over.

“I call this idea the airlock. You still lose a little bit of air—the space between the two doors—but it’s nothing compared to what you have inside. The doors just need to be sealed tight. And wood does not seal very well. This is just a model.”

“Well, what kind of seals do work?”

Vaughan scratched his beard. “Been thinking about that one. The lids on jars are pretty good: they have threads that make sure the jar stays constant while a bit of gel depresses to form a seal on the top. However, it’s a bit awkward to use, I’m thinking we’ll need to make a sort of door that compresses rubber or plastic. Over there I’m actually working on a spring-loaded crank that pushes a door shut as hard as possible. Makes it hard to open, but hey, it seals pretty well.”

“Wow… you guys really are working hard at this, huh?”

“It’s a crazy little dream,” Vaughan said with a chuckle. “At this point, even I recognize how silly I was being at the start. Now I’m still being silly, but at least I know it. And the silliness leads to progress! If we perfect this ship it will make it easier not only to travel to space, but all of Ikyu. Blue showed us some cool things about orbits a few days back—uh, orbits are…”

“I know, she told me. Sort of. I was kind of talking to her when she found it. It was weird.” Sandy quickly held up her hands. “But fun! A fun kind of weird!”

“That’s basically all we do around here…” Vaughan said.

Sandy started to wander around the room. “Can I see it?”

“Hmm?”

“The… Skyseed. If it’s not too much trouble.”

Vaughan twirled his scepter and levitated the sheets off the Skyseed, revealing it in all its glory. Which, all things considered, wasn’t much. The drive was the only part that actually looked fancy, and it was rather small compared to the rest of the ship.

Sandy’s eyes nonetheless lit up with delight. “Oh, it’s so… unusual looking! I thought it would have to look like a big bird…”

“Things are very different up there. I’m pretty sure our next ship is going to be as close to a perfect sphere as we can manage so the drive has an easy time moving things, even at an angle, if we wanted it to.”

Sandy smiled. “Well… I wish you luck! Next time I drop by I expect to see a moon rock hanging on your wall somewhere.”

“That’s the idea!” Vaughan tipped his hat to her as she left, most likely to return to her room.

~~~

Vaughan kept to his promise to teach Blue more advanced magical concepts.

“Let’s try for a topic today,” Vaughan said.

“A topic?” Blue made a mock gasp. “You? Have a lesson structure? Egads.”

Vaughan rolled his eyes. The two of them took their seats in Vaughan’s upturned living room. He’d rolled a blackboard in previously, though he rarely used it in his lectures. So Blue was a little shocked when he grabbed a piece of chalk and started writing on the board. Communication Methods.

“The most common form of arcane communication is the relay, which doesn’t even need crystals, strictly speaking, since you can make it with a guy who has a bunch of flags standing on top of a tower that waves at the other tower. The arcane versions just have wizards using crystals to send colored signals. Purple is the best for this, but technically any color could work so long as sight isn’t obstructed. There’s nothing complicated here.”

“And that’s how important government news travels,” Blue added. “It can’t hold many messages so the rest relies on messengers like me.”

“Purple wizards have actually managed to refine some of their light spells so well that they can shoot messages across vast distances, assuming they know precisely where the next tower is.”

“Which isn’t feasible for spaceflight since the target is moving and so small.”

Vaughan nodded. “Quite. Anyway, that’s the familiar one. The next one is similar, the auto-relay. You know what this one is?”

“It’s just the relay without people.”

“Precisely. The idea is to have large Magenta spheres on top of towers—or another shape if you don’t want the signal to pass straight through. At the sending end, someone asks the Magenta crystal to cast a specific flash of light in Purple. The Magenta sphere carries the signal straight to another sphere, and another sphere, and another until it hits a Purple crystal and releases the message. Naturally, for sending things other than a straight line, you need specific Magenta shapes. Which leads us to my other talking point… shapes.”

Blue suddenly perked up. “Wait, are you actually teaching me Magenta craft?”

“The basics,” Vaughan said. “The sphere is the simplest, as it will always carry a signal straight through. However, it’s rather difficult to maintain a sphere as crystals do not like taking round shapes. The natural shape of Magenta directs the incoming spell based on what direction you give the input, which is especially hard to narrow down since ‘contact’ with a crystal is never just one point, it’s multiple. Even poking it with just a finger can go a few different ways. We’re fortunate enough that once a Magenta crystal relays a spell, then it’s treated as a single point, and we can solve directly. Still, the natural shape is not very useful for crystal cores. The ones that are useful are…” He paused to scribble down some things. “Cylinders, wires, cones, and the divider. Cylinders force the incoming spell through its shaft no matter what angle it’s coming in at. Wires are just bent cylinders that force the spell along the shaft of whatever shape you want. It is really important that the wires be round. If there are defects, it’s possible the spell could escape, and then everything collapses.”

“And crystals loooove to grow sharp edges.”

“The cones are like cylinders, except they can focus a spell to emerge at a precision point. The divider… it deserves a bit more detail. Take a cylinder, but make one side larger than the other.” He paused to draw it. “Now, if you send something in the small end, it will come out at one point on the larger end. It could pop out anywhere, but the largest chance is near the edges of the circle or the center, with the least likely spots being the ‘middle’ circle. However, if you, say, cut the larger circle in half…” He drew a line through it. “Then you have a divider. This will ensure the spell comes out twice. Unfortunately, this also lowers the will within the spell significantly—will is notoriously hard to measure, don’t ask me about it—so it can’t be abused indefinitely.”

“…Can you make a combiner?”

Vaughan paused for a moment. “That… is a very interesting question. All attempts to create a combiner just have the other end shoot out two spells. However, theories suggest that this is because we aren’t actually releasing the spells at the same time; that there’s some infinitesimal difference for their travel times. Which basically means a combiner could only exist if we had perfect precision. Which we do not, as you know so well from your trajectory calculations.”

“Yeah…”

“Anyway, those are the basic components of Magenta. You can naturally make a splitter with points at the ends but traditionally the cones are separate elements in the crystal core so they can be replaced easier.” He returned to communication devices. “Regardless, these basic parts can be used to create most arcane devices. The ‘loop’ can usually be managed with two semicircular wires. Usually, though, cones are added just to make sure it’s precise, and then a divider is input to ensure the spell’s pattern is not lost when cast.

“Which brings us back to the Magenta relays; ones that are designed properly have loops without any spells in them that can catch incoming messages and store them, since messages are lost all the time due to imperfections. However, this means that atevery step along the way, a divider must be used to duplicate the message, lessening the will. On relatively small scales, the message will still be delivered just fine, as a blinking light is not a very intensive spell. However, over long scales, the issue becomes too much to deal with—but with the rate of lost messages, not having a backup is unacceptable, especially if the information is time-sensitive, as most messages sent on these things are since the rates are extremely expensive.”

Blue frowned. “It’s like a maximization problem. Chance of signal loss, transmission distance, required supervision…”

“Quite. But within, say, a city, a complex relay system can be setup without an insurmountable amount of trouble. It’s when you try to go to the next town over that the other problem rears its ugly head. Will is lost while spells are traveling as well. It always costs more will to cast a spell at greater distance, and spells relayed by Magenta are no exception. As a spell travels through empty space—or, air, I guess, we’ll have to run tests on that—it loses cohesion. This is a function of distance, not time. Certain intricately crafted spells designed with internal backups—this is what Magenta wizards spend all their time making—can go further before deteriorating completely, but even this is rarely enough to get to the next town over via relays, even simple spherical ones.

“The obvious solution is the next communication method: very long wires. So far as we know, there is no limit to the distance a spell can travel through one. The problem with very long wires is that they have to be thin to be cost-effective, and thin wires are much more prone to breaking or losing signals. Not to mention random creatures out in the wild that can easily ruin the entire thing. Guarding a miles-long wire? Bah!”

“So… those are all the communication methods I’m aware of,” Blue said. “There are others?”

Vaughan grinned. “Oh yes there are! Behold, the rubber snake!” He drew two lines, placing a bunch of triangles inside of it. “Imagine these are a bunch of rather small Magenta cones, and they are completely surrounded on every side by rubber. However, the distance between the cones is such that the spell signal can pass through the small bit of rubber between the cone point and the face of the next cone. The major benefit to this design is that you can bend the wire wherever you want. The downside is that manufacturing a rubber snake is a pain, and since the surface area of cones is higher than that of a basic wire, it won’t last as long before deteriorating. Not to mention the fact that there’s no way to perform upkeep on cones trapped in rubber. But hey, it’s fast, and it can go over really long distances since the distance it travels ‘outside’ the Magenta is pathetically tiny.”

“…Sounds very impractical.”

“Oh, it is, it is! But it’s cool right?”

“Still not helpful in space, though.”

Vaughan nodded. “Quite. The longest range we have for something that requires no physical medium is a Purple light signal. Unless you go into legendary Crystalline One feats. Supposedly Ekro the Purple sent out some kind of signal that could be picked up by everyone continent-wide, so long as they had the device she specifically created to receive it.”

“That would be nice.”

“Would you like to Awaken a Purple Crystalline One? Or go ask an existing one to come down nicely?”

“Uh… I’ll pass on that one.”

“Right. Which leaves us with just one more method of arcane communication. Well, barring, I suppose, unique attributes or Blue-enhanced messengers running at just-below-ignition speeds.”

“Hah hah, Blue-enhanced, definitely funny, not a joke I’ve heard before, oh no.”

“…It was an observation.”

“…Ah.”

“The last method is perhaps the most fun. The zipline. For the zipline, all you need are two arcane devices called nodes at either end of a long-distance, and a rope of some kind that connects them. When you want to send a message, you go to one of the nodes and put a message spell and some extra will into it. It will take the spell and store it in a tiny loop, and it will take the will and push the tiny loop out onto the rope with some Orange. If it’s designed right, this little push will take the tiny loop all the way to the other node, where it will be accepted and taken in. In practice, this only works downhill.”

“It sounds… inefficient.”

“Ah, but it will take messages over long distances without the relay problem! Also rope doesn’t break as often as crystal wire. The issue is, as usual, guarding. It works in concept but hasn’t been implemented on a large scale yet.”

“There’s got to be a better way to do this,” Blue grumbled.

“Hey, I’m just the lecturer, I tell you the way things are, not how they could be.”

“…I think I prefer it when these are more conversational.”

“Oh, we’re not done. Now I get to describe the relation between the surface area, spell strength, and rate of crystal deformation!”

~~~

For the first time since she’d arrived at the cabin, Sandy set foot outside. Granted, it was a little odd stepping out of a window into a land of snow and dripping icicles, but it was still a magical moment nonetheless. Naturally, she had herself wrapped in several layers of blanket in addition to her bushy leaves, so much that she was perhaps a little too warm in all of them.

“Woah!” Jeh called from on top of the highest slide. “You got out here before everything melted!”

Sandy chuckled. “Well, I couldn’t stay sick so long that I missed it, right?”

“Guess not.” Jeh poked her head over the edge. “Sooo… up for a little ride down my slide?”

“I’d… rather not slide around on an ice-cold twisting tunnel of doom, but thanks for offering!”

“Oh. Well, uh… then I could show you my caves. I dug them. They’re starting to melt too, though it only makes it more slippery…” Jeh scratched the back of her head. “Yeah.”

“Why don’t you come down here and I can show you something cool?” Sandy asked.

“All right!” Jeh literally jumped off the tower and landed, cracking both of her legs.

Sandy blinked. “Ah. They weren’t exaggerations, then.”

“Nope!” Jeh grinned. “So, what do you have to show me?”

Sandy took in a deep breath. On release, she deposited several blue-white seeds into the largest hole in the snow. Delicately, she pressed her hands together and closed her eyes.

Far beneath the snow, the seeds reacted. Bursts of blue-white leaves on long, spindly stalks erupted from the snow, sending sparkling ice flecks into the air that gave the area an ethereal quality.

Now that the sprouting was done—frostweed was particularly violent with its sproutings—Sandy could focus on individual plants. She asked one to grow a little bit to the side, another to grow in a corkscrew, and she eventually had all of them dancing in a circle around Jeh.

“Woah…” Jeh said, blinking. “That’s… something.”

Sandy only nodded, keeping her focus up. She told the various frostweeds to grow under Jeh and lift her into the air playfully, though an individual frostweed was not strong enough to do this, so she had to bundle them together like ropes as they grew. Already, she was noticing some strain in the plants from lack of available nutrients. Frostweeds were efficient, but they weren’t that efficient.

Just a little longer…

“Whee!” Jeh laughed as the weeds twisted around her, bringing her a bit closer to Sandy. She twisted one of the weed-ropes to grab hold of Jeh’s loose hood. The vine pulled it down and taught before raising it over Jeh’s head, turning her into a full bear.

Done.

The weeds all collapsed in a heap and Jeh landed on her rear flat on the ice.

“Did that hurt?” Sandy asked.

“I mean, yeah, but who cares about pain? That was awesome!”

Sandy smiled warmly. “I’m glad you liked it! It… takes a bit of energy, to do that much. So... you’ve never seen a dryad before, huh?”

“Not a single one!” Jeh said. “That was… wow! New!”

Sandy adjusted her cat-ears. “Most of us don’t know how to work with frostweed, or how to lay seed. We generally rely on the plants already being present for us to work with in any situation.”

“But you carry seeds, that’s awesome! And it has to be very useful.”

Sandy thought about the sandbox tree seeds she had stowed deep within her leaves. “There’s a seed for every occasion!”

“I bet Blue could come up with some very cool uses for growing plants that fast. She’s cool like that.”

“I watched her come up with the orbits thing. She really is something, isn’t she?”

“Yep! I hope she gets to come with me to space next time; it’s kind of sad that no one but me gets to see it.”

Sandy nodded, unable to stop herself from laughing—and then laughing harder, and harder.

“Uh… what’s… what’s so funny?”

“You… You wouldn’t have context for it, sorry.” She regained control of herself and extended her hand to Jeh. “I never told you it was nice to meet you, did I?”

Jeh shook her hand vigorously. “Nope! But it’s nice to meet you too!”

“Do you want to eat some of these frostweeds now?”

“…Eh, I’m getting kind of tired of the taste.”

“Understandable. How about…” Sandy plucked another seed out. “If we can find enough good soil, I can get you a pumpkin.”

“Woah… let’s go digging!”

“Um… can you do the digging?”

“Oh, sure, I’ve been getting real good at it. Just wait here!”

“I’ll wait inside, if you don’t mind,” Sandy said, entering the cabin once more.

Well, that’s that. All that’s left to do is wait for the snow to melt.

~~~

It was about a week later when the snow finally melted enough that Vaughan considered it “travelable.”

“Look,” Vaughan said as he set a pack on Sandy’s back. “I know I’ve been saying I’ll evict you, but you can stay if you want.”

“Thanks, but I do have a life to get back to,” Sandy said. “But I will treasure this memory always! And I might drop by to visit, see that moon rock of yours.”

“It’ll be proudly hanging when you come back!”

Blue facehooved. “We don’t even have a timetable yet, Vaughan. It could be years before we get it.”

Sandy chuckled. “Blue, you could stand to be a bit more optimistic. Vaughan, you could learn some patience.”

“What about me?” Jeh asked.

Sandy stooped down slowly until she was eye-level with Jeh, her expression suddenly becoming gravely serious. “The people closest to you are the ones you can hurt the most. Don’t dismiss them.”

Jeh blinked a few times. “I… think I get it?”

“Good!” Sandy stood up quickly with a big smile. “Then you’re all set, have fun going to space!” She started walking away into the forest, but she did so backward so she could wave to them as she went.

“You have fun figuring out how to explain this winter to everyone!” Blue called.

“It’ll be an experience!” Sandy said with a laugh before finally turning and walking away.

At this point, Suro walked up the path to the cabin. “…Who was that?”

“Sandy,” Vaughan said. “She’d a dryad we found in the snow. Poor thing would have froze if we hadn’t been here.”

“…I bet she’s really happy she found you. What was she even doing out here?”

“Oh, come inside, let’s just tell you the whole story of Winter, and you can tell us yours.”

Suro nodded in agreement, and the four original members of the Wizard Space Program went into the cabin.

Elsewhere, on top of a very tall tree, a certain pink gari had tied two small telescopes together with rope and was holding both of them to her eyes. Through the lenses, she caught sight of Sandy walking into the forest.

The dryad stopped, took out a notebook, wrote something in it, and then continued on her way.

Seskii lowered the makeshift binoculars from her face and narrowed her eyes. “Hmmm…” With a shrug, her usual smile returned and she did a series of jumps and loops down the tree back to the forest floor. She rushed to the cabin—she could finally be around everyone again. The three people who had been locked up in that cabin had been without her long enough.

The only thing she hadn’t decided yet was what fruit juice to offer first…

~~~

SCIENCE SEGMENT

Orbits are fun! Elliptical orbits are a mess and Blue’s not calculating those correctly anyway so let’s leave them aside for now and talk about circular orbits. The nice thing about circular orbits is that the math is super simple: you just need your acceleration due to gravity, velocity, and distance from the center of the Earth. Or, in this case, Ikyu.

Let’s perform a simple calculation to find out how fast the ISS is going. (Well, how fast it would be going if it was moving in a perfect circle at constant altitude without any air resistance at all, which simply is not the case.) The acceleration due to gravity is more or less still 9.8 meters per second squared at that height, so we already have that. The radius is the distance from the ISS to the center of the Earth, about 6,800 km. (the ISS is about 400 km above the Earth’s surface.)

The formula we need is acceleration equals the velocity squared divided by the radius, or a=v^2/r in variable terms. This gives us 9.8(6,800,000) = v^2. If we take the square root of both sides we get a velocity of 8163 m/s, or about 8 km/s. Which is precisely what Blue did.

Now the ISS actually moves at about 7.66 km/s, but as mentioned before, our calculation was far from the ideal.

Notice how the mass of the ISS didn’t factor into the calculation at all. Essentially, how heavy something is does not change its orbital speed—the exception comes when the object becomes large enough to have a significant gravitational influence on Earth. So Blue is right that “really large objects” behave differently. Though this is not the only reason her mathematics keeps turning up discrepancies, but we’ll be finding out about those later.

One may ask where Blue got the formula for calculating the speed from gravitational acceleration considering the mathematical and scientific knowledge of her era. The answer: a ball on a string. The mathematics for the system of spinning a ball on the end of a string is basically identical for a small object orbiting a much larger one. The “acceleration” comes from the force of the string pulling the ball to the center, which, if you’re spinning the string correctly, will make the ball trace out a perfect circle.

On a less scientific and more historical note, “optical telegraphs” were really a thing used in ancient kingdoms to send messages over long distances. Large cranks were used to lift and lower “flags” in different combinations to send messages. There really did have to be a person in every tower to see the incoming message, every time. There were also varieties with lights, lamps, and a variety of other implements before the electric telegraph was implemented.

Before that, long-range messages were difficult. Couriers, pigeons, and smoke signals were used.

However, while most of these are useless in space, the optical “telegraph” actually isn’t. The wizards dismissed the idea of pointing a Purple light at the ship to send a message while in flight, but this is perfectly feasible and somewhat easy with our modern computers and technology. Just point a laser at the ship’s receiver and you can send basically all the data you want.

The really interesting thing about lasers, though, is that you could also use them to send energy. Future spacecraft could be powered by remote, if only we bothered to build a large laser facility that would shoot power directly to anyone who wanted it.