World Tree MUSH

This Blossom essentially looks like a dead world. The cities are ruined and overgrown in the rare instances that they're recognizable as anything beyond 'forests with fairly regular cliff-faces' in the first place, metal is twisted and rusted away, and none of the windows anywhere have glass. Before the mysterious calamity befell this world more than six and a half centuries ago, it was simply called Earth. Now, with the human race extinct, it is known as the halcyon remnant.

The only sign of human life is, in fact, a small exploratory outpost established by the Gardeners, in a weird sort of high-tech garage near where a lot of the vines are depositing everyone. Here, locations are catalogued, artifacts are examined, and in general, information about the world is processed.

It's not just humans and other outworlders, however; there's a small number of eudaemons, shapeshifting techno-magical beings of unparalleled sophistication (by the standards of this world). Several of them are hanging around and helping out at the outpost. Others have already begun wandering the World Tree. From the perspective of the eudaemons in the Halcyon Remnant, blossoming is the most interesting thing that happened since the disaster.

The earliest of these exploratory eudaemons, Emily Nyx, is pacing somewhat impatiently back and forth outside the outpost. Right now, she's in the form of a human woman with auburn hair and glowing purple eyes, dressed in a midnight-blue business suit. She pulled some strings to put out the word requesting assistance from outworlders for an expedition to retrieve a particular artifact, for use in dealing with calamitous storms in another world -- her wording implied that it was a Thorn, but she generally left it somewhat vague.

Now, she just looks fairly impatient. There are several reasons for her impatience.

Dead worlds are not one of Jenny's favorite places. For one thing, to a planetary protector, this kind of thing smells like failure. Perhaps not her personal failure, but failure nonetheless. With no power in the ruined cities, too, there is nothing for her to draw on. Which is probably why she's scowling at the outpost, a wilted but lit cigarette dangling from between her teeth.

     Diantha is still very new to the world tree system, and would admit if asked that it's somewhat of a miracle she was able to find her way here after overhearing something about someone needing assistance on a dead world. She wasn't exactly sure what to expect. She'd heard enough stories of the shattered 'Outland' in her world's universe that even though she'd never gone there, even broken into pieces, it was somehow supporting life in some parts. Coming through the vine, she looked around a bit. Clearly whatever sentient life that used to call this world home had long ago destroyed themselves, or someone destroyed them then left. But in her opinion, the world was far from dead, it was bristling with life as nature moved in to reclaim the realm of man. 

     "Hmm, I wonder what happened here, and what the people who lived here were like... But in any case, it seems pretty peaceful now. I guess I'll see if I can find that person who needs help..." She trails off as she comes bounding through a stand of trees and spots the outpost, and the two women standing outside it. Her hooves dig into the ground a little as she suddenly stops, and she plants the butt end of her staff into the dirt at her side. "Well, hello. Is there some sort of problem here that needs to be fixed?" She asks, not sure if one of them is the originator of the message, or if what she heard was even true in the first place.

Emily pauses in her pacing, and regards Jenny for a long moment. And then she takes a deep breath, and her expression becomes an amused and perhaps faintly smug smile.

She raises her eyebrows at Diantha's arrival. The dryad's appearance doesn't seem to faze her in the slightest. "Yes, hello," she says. "I'm Nyx-model MLE0 --" She blinks, and shakes her head. "Okay, wow, I must be really distracted. Uh, I'm Emily Nyx, and I sent the message."

She pauses, looks between Diantha and Jenny for a moment, and then shrugs. "So, right now, there's a calamity going down in another Blossom," she says. "Potentially world-ending storms going on which seem to be artificial in nature -- specifically, they're caused by nanoprobes." She gestures, and silvery glitter seems to swirl around her hand. "Devices so minuscule as to be individually invisible to the --" Her eyes briefly flit to Diantha. "-- naked eye, but great enough in number that they can accomplish many things." The glitter settles, and her fingers on that hand are now sharp pointy claws.

She nods to the two women. "I can't help with that by myself -- I can only directly control my own nanomachines -- but I know generally where we might find a type of device which might be helpful for counteracting them called a nano-reclamation unit." She shrugs. "It's a shot in the dark, but I've already thrown my hat in with the defense, and it'd be a pain if I couldn't pull my own weight." A bit more frustration seeps into her voice than she intended there ...

Jenny Sparks nods. "This place is a little...rural...for my preferences," the blonde notes. She looks no more than eighteen, but there's something in her eyes. "But I'm not without experience finding weird stuff."

     Diantha blinks a bit after hearing Emily speak of nanoprobes, which while the term goes right over her head at first, she does understand when Emily explains that they are machines so small you can't see them with your eyes, even if that alone seems insane to her given her world's level of technology. "Tiny machines you can't see that can cause storms... This is far beyond any technology I've ever heard of, or likely anyone on my world has even dreamed of, but I'll do whatever I can to help you find this device you say can be used against them." Her fur bristles a bit and her tail twitches at the mere thought of microscopic machines with that kind of power. She tries to calm her nerves though and turns to Jenny, happy for the breif chance of subject, and responds with her opinion. "I think it's rather nice here... But that's probably not much of a shock to either of you." She then regards them both equally and introduces herself. "I'm Diantha Windsong."

Emily shoots Jenny a grin. "When there's nobody left to stop it anymore, nature just steps in," she says. "Of course, this halcyon remnant has only gone the second-longest without human habitation of the worlds I've visited. The other one has a lot more robot-fights, though."

She smiles, and shrugs in response to Diantha. "It's strength in numbers, really," she says. "The number of nanomachines inside me alone is approximately 3.387 quintillion. A nineteen-digit number. I dunno how the nanoprobes are causing the storm, but ... you could probably build a whole other Emily Nyx out of 'em and have room to spare." (Of course, Jenny's ability might detect that there's also a single cylindrical device inside of Emily's torso, so more nanomachines probably wouldn't be enough ...)

She hmms. "So, how are we gonna head out?" she says. "I could probably change into something that could just about support both of your weight, if we wanted to fly. Be a little easier if we're sticking to the ground, but ... there's a bunch of tradeoffs there."

Jenny Sparks purses her lips. "I'm afraid I don't have a way to travel quickly." She glances at the deer, who is likely to be the fastest of them. "And no, it's not obvious." She's never met a deer-taur before, presumably an alien, but given her lack of any familiarity with the species...Jenny is assuming nothing.

     "If flying would be easier you don't need to worry about me, I'm capable of shapeshifting, so I can just turn into my bird form. I won't be able to speak till I change back, but I can try to stay close enough to listen if there is anything else you wish to tell us about this device we're trying to recover along the way. Will that work then? I assume if you can barely carry both of us, if you don't have to worry about my weight it should be no problem." Diantha offers with a hopeful tone, she was also not oblivious to the fact that she was likely significantly heavier than Jenny due to the added bulk of her lower half.

Emily brightens at Diantha's comment. "Oh, well in that case, it's extremely probable that I could carry just Jenny!" she says. "Nice to meet a fellow shapeshifter, by the way."

She considers this a moment, and then in a swirl of silvery glitter, she transforms into a large midnight-colored ostrich-like bird with a saddle and stirrups. And still with glowing purple eyes. It ... doesn't look particularly aerodynamic, or capable of flight even without a passenger. "So, then, shall we away?"

"Well, huh, been a while." Jenny can't shapeshift. Teleport, yes, but not here. She's not about to *admit* she's nothing more than a normal human on this world. But she at least mounts the Emi-stritch with ease.

     Diantha nods and smiles. It was nice to be appreciated, though after all that talk of nanomachines, she had a feeling their methods of shapeshifting were quite different. "Part of being a druid where I come from, and just one of my many talents." She offers as she focuses her magic on the change to a bird. Her body quickly begins to shrink rapidly and much of it seems to just shrink away to nothing as the two halves of her body sort of begin to merge and take on an avian shape. Her front legs become her new bird legs and her hooves become small taloned feet, while her rear legs merge with her tail and her eyes are moved to the side of her head as it reshapes and her mouth becomes a beak. In just a matter of seconds, a large purple raven stands where the dryad had been, and she spreads her wings a bit to stretch before flapping hard and running a bit with her legs as she takes off from the ground and continues to flap with all her strength as she works at climbing higher into the air while keeping an eye on Emily, ready to follow.

Soon, the group is flying over the landscape. From higher up, it's actually fairly easy to see the layout of the city that this forest used to occupy. You can just about make out roads, the outlines of city blocks, a few shopping plazas or parks or other features ...

And oddly enough, there's electricity and magic running here and there, localized to a few small places, hidden under the surface.

"We still don't know what happened to this world," says Emily as they fly along. "I was activated right afterward, anyway. The humans of this world, the Masters, simply died six and a half centuries ago. And their artificial servants, us Eudaemons, are now without masters." She says this very matter-of-factly, as if it's of no concern to her. "A few pieces of magic and technology remain, such as the nano-reclamation units. But for the most part, we're at least three iterations into post-post-apocalypse here."

She then starts circling around a block with the foundations of a skyscraper still more-or-less visible in one corner, with a source of both magic and electricity beneath it. "Okay, the storage for the units should be around this area somewhere," she says. "The hard part is gonna be finding the right building. If we get close enough to it, I'll be able to connect to the systems to get a closer look, but the things I'm able to use to narrow it down did not like six hundred years of disuse and the elements."

Jenny Sparks frowns a little bit. She's clearly ridden before, perhaps not on an Emi-stritch, but she knows how to balance herself and not be a sack of potatoes. "I know which building it is," she says, sounding much older than the eighteen or nineteen years she shows. She points. "It's under there. Or at least something is."

     Diantha moves closer to Emily's now avian form and flies at her side as she adjusts to keep the same speed. She listens as Emily explains that what little she knows about what happened to the humans who once inhabited this planet, and how her kind were created by them. It all sounded rather incredible, and even a little frightening to her. The thought that there used to be on this world, and might still be on others, beings that could create life, intelligent life which can even change it's shape. Clearly her life will be stranger and a little more complicated now. She scans the ruined city as Emily speaks about what she's looking for being in this area, and needing to connect to some systems that are a little worse for wear after all the time that has passed. Then Jenny just says she knows where it is, causing Diantha to blink and turn one eye toward the woman. How did she know already?

Emily raises her eyebrows at Jenny. "Well, now!" she says. "Seems like I picked the right passenger! A special ability, I presume?"

She comes in for a landing. After letting Jenny get off, there's another swirl of glitter as she transforms into a lavender-skinned demon with six glowing purple eyes in two vertical rows, curved horns, and hair so black it looks like a rip in space or a graphical glitch, dressed in a bright pink crop top that says "I'LL STOP WEARING PINK WHEN THEY INVENT A DARKER COLOR", sky-blue booty shorts bearing the text of some evil AI's rant about hating humanity on the backside, and white sneakers.

She holds out her hand, and narrows her eyes as she seems to concentrate. "Wow," she says; she still has the same voice. "Yep, thanks, Jenny, you led us right to it! Now all we need to do is find some way of getting underground." The surface of the ruins are quite impenetrably foresty, but again, there's the faint impressions of whatever the building had once been for, and there's even a few rusted metal plates and columns and ex-doors around.

Jenny Sparks dismounts lightly. "Yes," she admits, finally. She checks nothing fell out of her pockets, and then starts to examine the ruins. Underground...but of course, anything above ground would be long gone.

     Diantha follows after Emily as she lands, landing several feet away and shifting back to her normal form, the earlier changes happening in reverse now. Somehow she still has her staff. She looks more than a little weirded out by Emily's new form, it did look more a little demonic to her, which gives her pause, but Emily had said she was made up of tiny machines, which clearly made her something entirely different than a demon at least by her definition, she could have perhaps been lying, but Diantha had hadn't seen any signs of deception. So for now, she reserves judgement. "Underground you say? I don't really have any forms that will help much with that. I could possibly use some magic to encourage some roots to pry open a way in though."

Emily nods to each of them in turn, hands on her hips. Her mannerisms are more-or-less exactly the same as they were in her 'human' form as well. "All right," she says, materializing a second pair of arms and flipping her hair. "I think I can work with that." She frowns, once again concentrating. "The system is informing me that it can't even tell where we are, even when I send in my exact coordinates ..." She shakes her head, and her smile returns. "Jenny, is it magic you're detecting? Technological activity? Both? Something more specific?"

The basement is one floor beneath them, and about half of it is filled with roots and underground flora and fauna, as well as functioning electricity from a magic-driven generator even further underground. The wires might even be close enough to the surface as to make out individual hallways ...

"Electricity," the blonde says, succinctly. "There's an active power source down there." Magic, Jenny can't speak to. The "young" woman starts to pace a little, feeling the power between them. "About one floor down, assuming the wires are in the ceiling." If she could find one wire close to the surface...close enough to jump into...

     Diantha nods to each of them in turn as she listens, the talk of technology she doesn't fully understand, but what they were here for was apparently about a floor below them. "ALright, might want to stand back and hold onto something." She warns as she aims her staff down toward the floor in the opposite corner of the room. She begins to draw upon the energy of nature around her, of which there was certainly plenty of, and focuses it into the roots around the building they are in, and also those that had grown into the building itself, Soon they start to grow rapidly and breach a hole in the floor they are standing on, and also another into the ceiling leading to the next floor down. She then directs the roots to recede, leaving an opening in both floors. "How's that?"

There is, in fact, a wire that passes right beneath a hole in the ground. "... Aaaaand now it's gotten completely incoherent," Emily sighs. "Oh well, I can give us a map if we can get into the ..."

She blinks as Diantha opens up the floor with a tree. "... basement. Okay! Thank you, Diantha!"

She jumps into hole, and raises her upper-left hand, which transforms into a glowing orb of light. "Let's see ..." She holds out her lower-right hand, and a hologram of a three-dimensional map appears, followed shortly by glowing orbs marking their destination.

After a few minutes of walking, they reach a gray metal sliding door with a sign saying STORAGE above it. "All righty, here we go!" she says, and smacks a panel marked "OPEN."

Nothing happens; there's no power going to the door.

"Uhh ... hmm." She steps back and taps her chin thoughtfully. "Should I stab it, or do either of you have a more creative solution?"

Jenny Sparks sighs. "Allow me." She steps forward and lifts her hand. There's a faint crackling sound, and electricity arcs from the woman's fingers to the panel. "Try now." That SHOULD be just enough juice to get it open, if she's measuring it right.

     Diantha moves to the hole she made leading down, and looks into the rooms below. tail twitching a bit as she swallows hard, feeling a little uncomfortable about leaping down into an unknown underground room. At least it seemed like there was a fair amount of space down there, with the halls leading down a bit. She eventually takes a careful leap down to the next floor, and another to the one below that, and bounds to catch up with the pair after having fallen a little behind in her indecision about whether to follow. For the door issue, it appears Jenny has it covered, so she stands back and lets the other woman have the spotlight a bit. "So it's just on the other side of this door?"

"Hooray!" Emily grins and hits the panel again. The door starts to groan, gets caught halfway, and then stops.

And on the other side of the door is a knocked-over pile of devices what look like backpack-mounted vacuum cleaners, except without any vents or anything on the main body. All of them are damaged and dented, and some show visible signs of rust.

Emily peers in. "Okay, it's talking again," she says. "It's giving me a list of serial numbers of the ones that are beyond repair last time a maintenance machine came by here ..." She raises a finger. "... and of the units here that are responding to a ping, every last one of them is on the list so far ..." she murmurs.

And then she brightens. "Aha!" She clambers in. A moment later, she pushes a device through the half-open door which is, to all appearances, indistinguishable from all the others. She climbs out in a way that seems to defy Newton's laws of motion, puts on the device, and then holds out the nozzle.

It hums to life, and a holographic screen appears above her hand. "Yesssss!" She grins, and the device shuts down. "Thank you both! You've been most helpful!"

She turns to head back the way they came, then pauses. "Now, here's hoping it actually still works twenty-four hours from now ..."