Even though Earth is the furthest I’ve attempted to look, it was one of the easiest visualisations I’ve ever done. What could be easier than my own living room? Mum’s not exactly into redecorating, either, so the most it changes is more books, different games, and whether she has the ironing board out. She was exactly where I was expecting her, barefoot and dressed in her usual semi-casual work clothes. Jules was a bit of a shock – he’s jumped at least three inches in height and gone all gangly. Thirteen’s obviously his year for Dad’s stork genes to activate.
It took a moment after me opening my eyes for them to react, to notice that more than half a dozen people had appeared in the living room (or, in a couple of cases, in the kitchen – where most of the audience partially retreated). Mum seemed to see only me at first, and then was off the couch and squeezing me to death. I started crying, of course, even though I knew it wasn’t really Mum, but a projection of Mum, and when she said: "You’re home, you’re home" over and over I had to try and explain what was really going on. It’s pretty hard to tell something that looks just like your Mum that she’s really just a psychic version of a holodeck projection of your Mum.
Fake-Mum, after a moment’s shock, thought that was really interesting – which kind of says everything about my family – and then asked me why one of my eyes was a different colour. Jules was busy ogling Kaoren and telling him to make the cool sword come out of his arm again, a demand which Kaoren’s Symbol Sight didn’t seem equal to translating, so I told Jules I could do that too and made a spike for him, but then introduced Kaoren to fake-Mum and explained that we were engaged and getting married in about a year and a half and that I would try to visit properly but didn’t know if it would be possible.
Mum’s reaction made me laugh, and I told Kaoren: "Mum says that if she was real she would congratulate us and welcome you to the family, but thinks that should be saved for when she really gets to see me again and instead will give you several pointed hints about find a way for me to visit Earth." Kaoren said he’d try, and then gave me a warning about my energy use, but I gave myself a free extension by expanding my senses – finding it marvellously easy. It made me feel a lot less like passing out, but also infinitely less focused.
I told fake-Mum I didn’t have a lot of time, but had a bunch of questions. First, how did I go with my exams?[8] She didn’t know – she hadn’t opened the letter, but sent Jules to get it for me. Second, what did aether and touchstone mean on Earth? Fake-Mum more or less knew the answers, but since she had her laptop, she googled the words for me. It’s so weird that she was able to do it, and it really hit me in terms of energy cost, but now I know that a touchstone was a piece of rock used to test the quality of metal, which doesn’t match me at all, and that aether meant pretty much what I thought it meant. Next thing I wanted to know was how everyone in the family was. Mum said that Nick had gotten into the uni he wanted, and that I’d missed the Olympics. I was just going to ask what had been happening in my favourite shows and webcomics when a weirdness in my peripheral vision distracted me – and when I turned my head to focus on it properly it distracted me so completely that I dropped the visualisation altogether, fake-Mum and fake-Jules and fake-home fading away in a few seconds.
Kaoren moved forward, concerned, as I turned my head again to see whether my distraction would keep happening, and then I said "Streaming visual," and tried to show them what I was seeing.
There was this whole other world lurking out of the corner of my eye. If I kept up my expanded senses, and moved my head sharply, for a moment I could see it overlaid over Muina’s near-space. And yet, it was Muina, just a different version of it. The old town was still there, sprawled along the lake bank to the north, except much larger and grander and not ruined at all, and with this huge beam of light shooting up into the sky from where the amphitheatre is. And big statues of people, including one out in the lake with some kind of temple built around it, and these incredible crystal structures which were glowing with the last vestiges of sunset. No hint at all of Pandora, whose buildings are already well-formed in the area’s near-space. It was coming up to night-time in the other world, and lots of the windows were lit, and it looked very sumptuous and busy. We seemed to be sitting just outside one of the buildings, and I had a vague glimpse of a person just to my right walking into the building. Just an ordinary-looking person, dressed a bit like the Nurans.
I’m seriously glad that the interface was able to transmit what I was seeing, because I must have looked particularly weird getting all fascinated with my peripheral vision. The Nurans had to wait until we were back in real-space to be shown what I was seeing.
It was really really tiring trying to look at it, though, especially coming on top of my Earth visualisation, and I could only manage a half-dozen side-swiped glimpses before I started feeling grey and ill and Tsur Selkie ordered me to stop. And of course going back into real-space made my vision go totally nuts from blurriness. I’ve learned from past mistakes, though and kept my eyes shut, risking only the briefest squint. The headache from that was enough to send me to the infirmary for the rest of the day. I gather that they were worried that my interface was going to start growing again, because it was giving the equivalent of feedback.
It’s taken two days for my eyesight to stop being blurry, which has meant two days of being blindfolded. That’s not as impossibly inconvenient as it sounds, since they gave me a little portable scanner which I could wear like sunglasses to use to see instead. Totally weird seeing the world that way, because all the colours and my depth perception were ever so slightly different. It exacerbated my ever-present blurriness headache to use it for more than a couple of minutes, but at least it meant I could get to the bathroom.
Sen had a wonderful time playing ministering angel while I lay about feeling rotten and reading. It’s a little harder to tell what Ys and Rye made of it all, but they seemed to be in the background a lot making sure that Sen’s attempts to nurse me didn’t end up with me having mugs of juice tipped on my head.
I’m feeling a lot better today. The headache only properly went away when the blurriness did. They haven’t even begun to decide what, if anything, my peripheral world means and what they might want to do about it.
Aspiration
Kaoren seems to have cast a spell on the kids while I wasn’t paying attention. We went down to have lunch on the common room patio to celebrate me being able to see normally again, and while Ys and Rye are still all quiet and wary, they constantly look at Kaoren to check his reaction to everything. The rest of Fourth, who were the only ones about for lunch, watched with intense amusement and Mori told me later that it was only to be expected.
Mori and the rest of Fourth Squad are only just beginning to relax with me again. They never reacted really negatively, but for a long while stopped gossiping and sending me comments over the interface. There’ll always be a level of constraint, though, I think, but as much because of my increasingly weird position of touchstone as because of the idea of "Tsee Ruuel + snuggles".