A forest that was not there yesterday

[unprophesied_of_ages]

The Lord Ruler is in his palace, when he sees a sight he hasn't seen in centuries. Trees, sunlight...is he hallucinating? The fact that there's a forest in his living room isn't the surprising part. The fact that there's a forest on his planet is. As soon as he walks through the door to where his living room isn't, it's definitely not a hallucination.

His stores of Allomantic metals abruptly disappear. They're still physically there, but the power is completely gone. He immediately turns to go back, only to see more forest.

At least his Feruchemy still works—he can tell because he's still alive—but that won't last him forever. He only has so much stored youth, and without both sets of abilities he can't replenish it. He hasn't been in so much danger since the beheading that one time. Returning to Scadrial is the highest and currently only priority. If spontaneous forests are a thing, he needs to find someone who can explain them and more importantly how to get back.

The next few hours are spent walking in an essentially randomly chosen direction, with the sun to his right. He's quite certain that suns are supposed to be moving across the sky, but that's not a pressing emergency. He already knew he wasn't on his own planet when he saw proper trees and plants instead of ash-covered monstrosities. Whenever he calls out, nobody responds. If it's an empty spontaneous forest, he's probably doomed.

After some time, he hears his stomach growl. He hasn't seen much that looks edible, but possibly that's just because he's not used to real plants. Berries. Berries used to exist. Those berries look tasty, and if they're poisonous it's not like he needs to worry about it. As always, he has a truly ridiculous amount of stored health in his gold jewelry. Tapping gold just in case, he eats a handful.

Comments

[unprophesied_of_ages]

"Secrecy it is, then.
Once they're looking, you might be spotted by an Inquisitor who notices they can sense your emotions and not your blood. But I can cover for that with copper any time you're close by me."

[imeanforever]

"I might just be able to counter that sense the same way I countered the emotion bubble's attempt to affect me, if you tell me more about how it works. But I don't know if it would be worth the time it'd take."

[unprophesied_of_ages]

"I can't really explain it very well. When burning zinc or brass, I sense other people's minds. Their emotions feel like a, a ball of clay or something, but rough and with some parts raised and others pressed down. And I can raise or press those parts to affect how strongly they're feeling different things. Whatever you did gave you a resistance to changes, but I can still sense that there's a ball of emotion there."

[imeanforever]

Promise shivers. "Later we are going to have to have a conversation about that but right now it is only tactically important and probably not very much that."

[unprophesied_of_ages]

Maybe Alendi should have considered not volunteering that information. "It will let me or most Inquisitors reliably check an area for fairies.

But you're right. If we can capture the Queen at all, we can probably do it in less than eight days. And then us versus Thorn here doesn't come up."

[imeanforever]

"Right. She can just casually absorb his court. She and hers have had long practice at that sort of thing."

[unprophesied_of_ages]

"So you'll need zinc, tin, and a portal to get you familiar with her court. And steel if you need physical speed to match the mental.

Can you use sorcery to suddenly change the scene to something you know and they don't? Like, say, this room. You wouldn't even have to do it fast, if you have a portal and the element of surprise."

[imeanforever]

"That would require more familiarity than I can probably acquire in eight days. And it would only help until whoever was in the changed room left it."

[unprophesied_of_ages]

"Even if you're acquiring familiarity at hundreds of times the normal rate? Once you have zinc and some charged metalminds, the limiting factor on mental speed is how much you can learn without getting bored.

And if you can change the room into a locked cell, the time until they leave might be a lot."

[imeanforever]

"I can walk through walls, that's how I got Yellow," says Promise.

[unprophesied_of_ages]

"Right.

That's also similar to one of Thorn's protections, the one I was most worried about. He can make himself pass through solid objects at will, which would include me. And I imagine it's probably harder to capture one of the Queen's top sorcerers to make them revoke it."

[imeanforever]

Promise nods. "I'm sure she has something like that, and probably more comparable things too. But that sort of thing does always need to be activated at will. If you can catch her by total surprise with a dart or something, and then manage to speak an order before whoever she's with kill you, it won't come into play."

[unprophesied_of_ages]

"So changing the terrain is a bad idea, then. I'll be able to speak at pretty much any speed, but might have to slow down so she hears it properly.

What sorts of things count? Just getting anything from the mortal world inside her body? I would not have expected darts to work."

[imeanforever]

"I don't know, unfortunately. I wouldn't have necessarily expected the metallic water to work. I'm reasonably sure that anywhere inside her body won't do; it might have to circulate in the blood."

[unprophesied_of_ages]

"That can't be it. Swallowing must also work; there's no way the metals had time to get absorbed through whatever digestive system fairies have when I did it to Thorn's people."

[imeanforever]

"I mean circulate in the blood if introduced via a non-swallowing mechanism. The underlying concept is, as I understand it, taking something you cannot in principle return."

[unprophesied_of_ages]

"I'm not sure I know fairy circulatory systems well enough to even try aiming for that, but I suppose I can spend massive amounts of luck on it. Massive amounts of luck can make things easier sometimes."

[imeanforever]

"I would imagine so. Should I be transmuting anything while we're having this conversation, for efficiency?"

[unprophesied_of_ages]

"Cadmium, probably. It's the small hexagonal orange one. Usually useless, but would have come in handy last time I was hiding from sorcerers. And once it exists, I can make another useful metal with ordinary metallurgy."

[imeanforever]

"How would it have helped?" she asks, picking up the orange thing from where she left it and getting started on transmuting it. "And should you be storing visual acuity for me while we have this conversation?"

[unprophesied_of_ages]

"That won't take long, but there's no reason to wait. I'll need at least one of your spikes if it's to be transferrable.

Verve turned me invisible and inaudible, but warned that sorcerers might be perceptive enough to detect air currents from breath. So I didn't breathe. I wouldn't die as long as I was using gold, but it cost me a fair amount of stored health and, obviously, felt like I suffocated several times. That sort of situation is actually cadmium's primary effect. And once I have absurd quantities stored, I could create wind to interfere with sorcerers."

[imeanforever]

Promise pulls out a spike. "Wind will do that, all right. Sudden light or darkness, too, which I'll be able to handle from my distant vantage point. Changes in temperature."

[unprophesied_of_ages]

"I can do that with brass. It only affects my body temperature directly, but if I use it along with the wind it should combine rather nicely."

[imeanforever]

She hands him the spike. "Right. So we can interfere crazily with the ambient conditions, which will throw off them but not you. Some sorcerers will be able to detect a gate appearing, so I probably had better not open one too close to the Queen's palace and you'll need to close the distance yourself, because I will need to be on the other end and I'm vulnerable if someone comes through."

[unprophesied_of_ages]

He inserts the spike into an appropriate location on his own shoulder, and begins filling five tinminds. (There are fairies who know his name. Of course he has five empty tinminds.)

"Can you make me sufficiently invisible to get someone alone who can get me to the Queen? Verve made me undetectable enough to beat Blossom, but that's all I know about the relative difficulties."