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

[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."

[imeanforever]

"I don't know anything about how the Queen's court is structured except guesswork and rumor and extrapolation. It seems very unlikely that there's any one person with unrestricted access to her; she isn't known to form close bonds with favorites the way even Thorn does and fairies are cheap to her, so getting anywhere might require two, ten, fifty."

[unprophesied_of_ages]

"That's doable. But it would take time we don't have, and I'd rather not have to reclaim this world from Thorn.

I'm assuming if you make me invisible and inaudible and I walk up to the Queen with a dart, something stops me. I should probably try for at least one ranking sorcerer to find out what that is."

[imeanforever]

"I assume she has excellent information security. Possibly up to and including someone capable of mental sorcery who's known others involved long and civilly enough to actually use it, so it might be that there are defenses literally no one remembers to be present."

[unprophesied_of_ages]

"That's a good idea. Should we use that? We'd probably be doomed if Thorn got far enough for it to matter.

So I capture as many sorcerers as I can and order them all to remove every protection they can think of at a particular signal.
That costs the surprise, though."

He scrapes some specks of metal off each tinmind, swallows them, and burns them. Instead of experiencing the burst of sensation from it, he stores that in another speck and repeats the process. After another four iterations, the tinminds contain literal millions of times the amount he stored. He keeps going.

[imeanforever]

"Use - what, mental sorcery? I don't know anyone near well enough to even try it, even if I'd studied the spells to begin with."

[unprophesied_of_ages]

"No, compartmentalized defenses. I can get people to forget things too, at least on this world."

[imeanforever]

"Maybe, but the sheer unfamiliarity with local magic will slow down intruders nearly as much as random captives being unable to disclose information about what we have set up. I can't do anything so exotic that they might forget about the possibility."

[unprophesied_of_ages]

"That, and if there are intruders here in the first place I'm already captured and you might be too."

[imeanforever]

"Thorn is familiar with me. He will be able to get any information I know out of me, and I don't think I can render myself unable to reconstruct the fact that something is missing if I forget things. And if he has you, he has me, because whatever you do with my name you fed me. Maybe I should have just told you my name to begin with, it was no longer perfectly my own anyway..."

[unprophesied_of_ages]

"You were under an order at the time; I'm pretty sure everything you did was optimal under the circumstances.

Anyway, the Queen. How close can you safely put a gate?"

[imeanforever]

"I've heard her palace and its environs described. I shouldn't put the gate directly against any landmarks I've heard of, but I can aim midair between them if you'll be all right coming out in midair."

[unprophesied_of_ages]

"That's fine as long as I don't land somewhere I need to be stealthy. Or if you can make me inaudible, I suppose."

[imeanforever]

"I can do inaudibility."

[unprophesied_of_ages]

"Can you do at-will inaudibility? Verve's version had to break permanently for me to give orders."

[imeanforever]

"...I can maybe do inaudibility that is conditional on something you do with an object. At-will I'd have to know you better than I do; it's almost like mental sorcery in that way. The object would of course be stealable, but maybe you can mitigate that if it's made of metal."

[unprophesied_of_ages]

"That only applies on this world. But it should be hard to steal something from an invisible person."

[imeanforever]

"It'd at least be challenging."

[unprophesied_of_ages]

"Is there anything else in particular we need planned before I get you zinc Feruchemy and you start scoping out the area?"

[imeanforever]

"I don't think so. We can form more specific plans when I have a look at the place. Is there a way to prevent me needing sleep for at least the next eight days? I was taking naps with Yellow keeping lookout, before, I wasn't just awake the entire time."

[unprophesied_of_ages]

"I'll get you a spike and some bronze to go with the zinc. I'll probably have everything ready before the gate settles."

[imeanforever]

"I'm going to make this gate very small. It'll be less conspicuous that way," says Promise. "I'll make a separate one you'll be able to walk through when I've seen candidate sites." She hands him the lump she's transmuted. "That's done."