# Somewhere



## metafang (Apr 4, 2018)

In this corner of the multiverse...

a calm, solid-looking ocean of opaque white nothing, softly glowing, stretches far to the horizon where a luminous indigo moon is rising. It takes three days for the moon here to set, and three days for it to rise - the moon being the one and only referenced celestial body by those living under it.

The atmosphere tonight is a warm, indulging doldrum, that soft sort of storm that takes so long to pass over the region so as to leave everything delighfully hazy, wet with mist and above all, electrically charged.

The ocean was heavy with particulate add-ons, the activity the storm was sweeping past with charging the unknowably wide and deep field of solid light with more and more mass.

Soon

the ocean of light would spring into a different formation than it ever had in the past or ever would on moonrises in the future.

Kaivey was watching the soft anti-glitter of bluecast shadow shimmering off the edges of the crest of the tide riding itself infinitely out against the side of the Tallest Boat, her home, for the time being.

She wondered what witnessing would be like tonight.

She wondered if she would have any visitors.







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## metafang (Apr 5, 2018)

The Tallest Boat was architecturally weird.

For one thing, those from outside this place, if they only saw the boat during the 72 hour period here called the Downtime, they would not understand how Tall the Boat is.

During the Uptime, however, when the moon's reflections illuminate all below it, the Ocean is no longer opaque. To someone not from here, it would appear that the Ocean gradually disappears - from the surface down, layer by layer - to reveal a multitude.

When the Ocean's light changes, the solid, unchanging and monotonous tone of the last 72 hours shifts into a spectral menagerie. Instead of solid white light, someone watching from a window above (or someone flying perhaps) may witness the Anarchy of life naturally unfolding below, three days invisible, three days vibrant and hyper active.

Sometimes visitors from below, but more usually from above, would stop and rest, ask questions, or cook a meal.

Kaivey watched as the expanse of lonely opaque nothing softened under the rising moonlight of the Uptime to reveal a familiar scene below.

To the East, a walled city with structures built (mostly) on the ground. Lots of humans lived there. Some anthros, too.
Though present and obviously a wall, the shape acted more like a funnel through which to squeeze too much activity- no one really believed about walls here anymore.

Opposite to the West, an environment dense and shapetacular as an Earthen coral forest environment stood, both immortal and fragile, heavy with magic and home to a lot of residences - a location where, to be sure now as in the past, an endless seeming quest to discover a way to capture moonlight in battery form is underway.

To the North, and the South, lay the Big Road.

Above, the sky reached up, up, into layers of atmosphere - and space, and the moon, and.

Below, some layers of sediment and dust, sand, debris, tiny growing life, cast-away words no one decided to say, then root systems, the underground houses, the geothermal vents, and the Strange Place.

It was always nice to watch the world become visible. It never lasted longer or shorter, yet for Kaivey, who had lived here eight years, the Uptime always felt shorter and shorter, maybe because the Downtime was... well, to be blunt, depressing.

She had only been in the Ocean during the Downtime once. Maybe it wasn't so bad for others, but for her, once was enough for a lifetime.

Becoming invisible to those except your very closest few (if you were lucky to have such in your life), while reverting back into your most basic ("chibi") elements, to survive the three-day cyclical drought of reflection, was for some a period of rest and relaxation. For some, it was their ideal situation in life. Everything still happens, just... less. In Miniature. Muted. Pastel. Bland. Symbolic.

So for Kaivey, finding somewhere to live where she wouldn't be subjected to that transformation was an important, and luckily for her, obvious life decision.

She watched, lost in memory as color exploded, blooming like algae across the landscape around her.

The Tallest Boat was a very tall boat - the scene stretched for miles, into the horizon spazming glitchily with excited photons.


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## metafang (Apr 5, 2018)

Kaivey was wearing a dress so magenta it was practically red except for the highlighter effect, casting hot pink hues off to the forms around clashing with the light of the rising moon. She didn't usually wear dresses, opting instead daily for a flowy skirt made mostly out of pockets and nothing on top. 

She took her eyes off the scene out the window, and in the changing light decided again to look at the Box. 

Getting up and crossing the space of the small room in a couple of well worn strides from window to door, she retrieved the cube shaped, smoothly driftwooded purplyred manzanita box with no hinges from a space inside a small cabinet in which was packed a series of tiny books. She had decided somewhere along the line to call it the "Astral Nebula Box".

The box was somewhere around the size of canned food and smelled like eucalyptus. She slid the snug lid from the base, and looked inside.





this Truly mysterious rough-hewn wooden (manzanita?) box washed ashore into Kaivey's life and ... she can't tell what these little orbs are likely to do, but isn't afraid of the unknown enough to send them back out into the drifting photon Ocean. She may even feel a little protective of them. Some of them feel mesmerizing to look at, some of them feel relaxing, one of them, that center one, feels really familiar. She closes the lid and slides the box back on to the precious empty space on the shelf. 

It feels now that the Uptime has really begun. Looking out the window, Kaivey grabs a blanket and sits on the floor wrapped in a thick, soft layer of deep green warmth.


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## metafang (Apr 6, 2018)

She couldn't stop thinking about one of the orbs. The green orb in the center. It felt so familiar... 

Realizing she felt a desire to be rid of the others, they just seemed risky somehow to hold on to, she was suddenly compelled to grab her cloak and go out the door, box and all. Not before finding a safe container for the one she wanted to keep. 

Good thing it was the Uptime. That meant plenty of folks would be around to help her maybe even understand what they are. Main thing was, to get them off her hands. 

She retrieved the box, opened it and removed the green orb in one swift set of motions. She hadn't touched the orb yet and was incredibly nervous, so applied her best not-thinking-about-it to the task and luckily... no pain or apparent cursing immediately resulted. The orb lay now in the center of her lap, where it hovered slightly above the surface of her dress, feeling much heavier somehow in spite of the fact it wasn't even landing on her. It felt similar to the weight of a small cat- for being so tiny. This was one thing about the box- combined with its' weird energy, the box also weighed strangely around 25 pounds. Something small enough to fit in the palm of her hand shouldn't be the same-feeling weight as a bulk bag  of rice the size of her torso. 






She had not really planned for the anxiety of where to transfer it to and the uneasiness she experienced about touching it longer than necessary with her hands.

A clean water cup had been set near the window on the floor. It was empty, but... what if the thing had an aversion to water? 

She looked around for something else. 

A beautiful leaf she had found earlier, dry and dead, was by her bookshelf. That felt like the cleanest thing around. She retrieved a green cloth and placed the orb on top of the leaf in the center of the cloth and wrapped it with one knot then another. 

Then she was, as she had pictured, out the door- cloak, hood, box, a fruit to eat later and her dagger if necessary, though it usually wasn't.

The door was a window she loved to climb out of. She could take the long way down, but this was faster and had the added bonus of being like a stretching excersize for her arms- wings?. The added weight skewed her decent slightly and made her a little panicked feeling- the box felt like it was leading her to the ground. An extra big swoop with her arms, - wings? the bag wrapped tight against her chest anchoring her down the eight story structure that was the Tallest Boat.

Midair, mostly falling but dealing with it safely, she scanned for figures to avoid crashing into.


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## metafang (Apr 23, 2018)

Kaivey didn't hit anyone on the way down, thankfully. 
it was un-usual, but there was no one else in sight today.

she stopped in at the desk on the ground to re-arrange her things. Someone had left the desk there a year ago with a sign that said free, and though the sign was long gone, the desk remained. either no one wanted it or everyone who could be involved in moving it somewhere else just wanted it to stay right where it had appeared. typically the desk was her finish line for flying practice, since she had graduated from the first learning curve of jumping from somewhere less tall and aiming for the abandoned mattress she had dragged from lake mattress. these days even though she still didn't really know how to stay flying, she expected to be able to make the hard landings and sit down at the table after a few wobbly steps back in contact with the ground. plus the mattress had become home to some kind of mom and baby animal suddenly when spring arrived, so.

glancing to the side , she saw the house where BZT lived.  She turned to the other side. The anchor which held the tallest boat was deeply half-buried in the ground of this place, imposingly large and bleached-out looking from sun and dust, though made of pock-marked, heavy iron. In between these the line of vision forward offered two large boulders and beyond them, the gates of the walled city.

Kaivey had everything she needed. Her home itself was an inter-dimensional shoreline and she had to keep busy if she was going to keep processing the dimensional debris that kept washing up. She just hoped that this time, the debris wasn't the kind of thing that could be dangerous in the wrong hands.

That kind of thing was harder to deal with.


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## metafang (Jul 26, 2018)

she walked slowly east toward the city gates, the squiggly particles of the Uptime feeling thick in the air .

BZT appeared in a smattering of pixelated light. "KA EE VEE !"






"GRR EE TING ZZ ." BZT fell over slightly in the air, zapping out of existence and re-appearing very close to her face. 

Kaivey smiled small, for her more than BZT because BZT's facial recognition features were not really made for emotions- only for speech, strangely. 

"what are you doing today BZT?" Kaivey tilted her head, talking with big mouth motions. 

"BEE ZEE TEE LIST : RUN EE KO SIS TEM DAY TAA KO LECT," BZT's eyes glazed momentarily with an opal looking sheen. Kaivey didn't know what that meant, but the lost software which had some how constituted a hardware body for itself from the interdimensional shoreline when it gained sentience and escaped its former context had been _collecting samples of sand, decaying data, and particles which are compatible with both shores _for three months. It took Kaivey about a month of hanging out with BZT to understand what ecosystem data collect meant to them, but, BZT's intuitions were usually on to something. BZT was entering these data samples into different local ant colonies and documenting the results. 

BZT's system had been partially deleted by their original developer before they were able to jump their housing. While another advanced software might fix its broken-ness so it could run models of what would happen with the samples and colonies, BZT either treated the unknown and chaos as a fact too much to simplify things down to an algorithm or its broken software made using models in this instance an inconceivable idea. Either way, Kaivey had never seen BZT so ... focused on something, as if BZT were discovering a way to eliminate the plague. 

BZT had moved on to examining individual grains of sand. Kaivey took this as a good cue to move forward as well with her tasks for the day. 
"Enjoy the day, please, BZT," Kaivey said, again, mostly to herself as she moved forward with her bag of interdimentia. 

The moon above was bright, radiating an energy of madness as she entered the city walls. They didn't connect as walls and functioned much more like visual and wind barriers. By now a muscle memory, once past the main gates Kaivey looked further east, then south, then north, muttered to herself in a slight anxiety, "doot dooot dooot," then cupped her winged arms near her mouth and yelled, 

"STUFF!"

"ANYONE LOOKIN FOR STUFF?"

"STUFF!"


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