❧ i n b o x

[abheirrant]

—pposed to know when to start speaking? That wasn't a very thorough explanation on what I'm to do this, now was it? Hello? Hello? Are you listening to me? Are you even still ther— [beep]

Comments

[superposition]

[ Baby steps! The image, of course, does not bite. Or respond in any way. See, not all technology is out to get you! ]

Hm. "Dead reckoning" in more ways than one. [ Cause... cause if you get it wrong, you're dead. It's mildly amusing, okay. ]

Not quite the level of precision I'm looking for, though. You'd need a proper survey - manual, or via satellite, or a barometric altimeter, properly calibrated, of course. But let's say that's been done, you have that data. Now you can express any position on the planet as a vector in a spherical coordinate system.

[ With his finger, he draws a line connecting the center with the dot on the surface. The surface end has an arrow. ]

The components being, of course, latitude, longitude, and magnitude - your absolute distance from the center of the Earth. Which is preferable to mean sea level, since technically the planet is an oblate spheroid, not a perfect sphere.

[ Still following? Good, cause he's moving right along. ]

So now, let's say you want to be somewhere else. [ He looks up the target coordinates on his watch, and does the math in his head while he's talking. ] All you need to solve for is the transform between this vector and the new one, and that's basic linear algebra.

[ Plugs in his answer, and voila - the vector swings over to a point in central Europe. Qubit smiles, self-satisifed. ]

Child's play.

[abheirrant]

[Annnnnnd Qubit lost him somewhere, probably right around the time he started talking about barometric altimeters and something about vectors.]

And... what did this Hermann fellow do with such equations, again?

[superposition]

[ ... Okay, yeah, maybe he did get bogged down in the details a bit there. Whatever, it's fine, we'll fix it in post. He was making his way toward the point, though: ]

Oh, he teleported himself to Germany.

[abheirrant]

To the Oktoberfest?

[He's lucky he can recall that word with how fuzzy the lights in his eyes are. That is some good tea.]

[superposition]

[ A short laugh. ] Not quite. He actually ended up further south, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. His hometown.

[ Or Earth-β's version, anyway. But homesickness does not make such distinctions. ]

He was still figuring out his power at the time. I believe at this point he'd only worked out teleportation in theory - it was the first time he'd actually done it, and he hadn't meant to. And then he didn't have enough energy to make the return trip, so he asked me to come pick him up.

[abheirrant]

How utterly terrifying that must be, to accidentally discover the reach of your abilities.

[HE WOULD KNOW.]

The ability to simply go home at will would be quite a boon in this place, though if one wanted to return, it wouldn't be as easy as asking a friend.