[YANS] (aka Yet Another New Story!) NaNoWriMo 2017 (COMPLETE)

Day 12 - I Scry With My Little Eye...

The story mists billowed and churned and then finally (reluctantly) let the Writer into the pseudo-living room. The rest of the cast was already there, in various stages of distraction.

"I'm not going any further until we have a plot." The Writer sat down at the writing desk, shooing away the plot bunnies. "We're going to get something hashed out before we go any further and don't give me random visions of the future and try and claim they count."

Khany muttered something unrepeatable and Jashn just rolled his eyes.

"Fine, if you're so determined to get an actual plot in place, then what have you got?" The Muse put down her tablet and did her best imitation of Jashn's patented single eyebrow raise of skepticism.

"Well we know the fair may cause the town to burn down and that Jashn is involved in both the town not burning down and possibly in the scrying pool's destruction." The Writer flipped through the previous day's pages. "We know the town can survive, but the pool may or may not."

"We don't know that the town burning is actually a bad thing," pointed out Dragon. "It could be that the fire is actually the good outcome."

"I'd assume that the pools being destroyed would be bad though," countered Khany, "and that's what showed up when I asked about the town burning. And the only reason it did is because the pools are sentient enough to realize that they needed to work with me or they would perish."

"I don't know if a body of water can really 'perish'," Dragon objected, but he seemed unsure.

"The whole line of questioning for the pools is a little odd," the Muse interjected. "Why are you always asking it to show you a specific future where something happens. Why not just ask it to show you the future?"

"Because there are too many possible futures," Jashn answered. "It branches out immediately after the present into an infinite variety. So you have to give it some sort of touchstone to work with."

The Muse was unimpressed. "But there has to be a most probably future, even with all those variables. There has to be some sort of threshold it's working with to answer your questions. In theory there are an infinite number of futures, so every possible future would have an answer... but they'd be so unlikely they'd never happen."

"And we already established that if that future isn't likely enough that the pool won't show it,' noted the Writer. "So she has a point. Is the reason we're asking the question like we do just a bad story choice that we need to retcon or can we make it more logical that we wouldn't just be asking 'show me what happens at the fair'?"

"Tradition?" Offered Khany after a moment.

"But tradition wouldn't keep Dragon from asking the more obvious way once it was certain that the cave (and Dragon) were in danger." The Writer frowned down at her notes willing an answer to appear from the margins. Sadly, it did not.

"Dragon is young though, maybe he misunderstood how the pools worked?" Jashn ignored the grumpy look Dragon shot him. "The dragon's are just people, so they aren't perfect. It could also be that the pools don't want to answer questions like that so they've avoided letting folks figure out that it's possible."

"I think that's going to boil down to how intelligent and powerful the pools actually are." The Muse shrugged and with a twist of her wrist summoned one of the scrying pools into the pseudo-living room.

The pool was not amused.

"So, you can see the future, right?" The Muse asked as the pool rearranged itself into a tiny volcano lake instead of just inset into the floor. "How?"