@any-shadow I BET U THOUGHT I FORGOT ABOUT THESE 8D
ahahaahah yes nox and jezebel both frequenty present themselves as pirates or bandits; they’ll even “raid” stuff from around the house (nox has a cave where they keep it); their cards give them leeway to pull a lot of antics.
Unfortunately the cardhouse is somewhat lacking in Oceans or even ocean-equivalents. like,,,there are rooms with fake beaches and fake oceans for the Aesthetic, but there’s no real ~freedom of the open seas~ feel anywhere. Boats are important though, just like trains. Gotta have em. So there are small-ish (but life-sized) maneuverable boats that can fly around parts of the house, especially between larger rooms (there might even be some miniature ones like the trains but idk. there could be a whole miniature transportation network. i’ll have to think about that). Anyway, obviously there are proper fantastical tall ships in the fake ocean rooms, but like,,,,you can’t really get around the house in them. The closest to real ship-equivalents that you get are the ones cardhousians use to “sail” through the White Desert when they need to meet with trade partners etc. The desert is….solid. Kind of. You can stand on it if you’ve a mind to. But you need some kind of vessel to transport any significant quantity of stuff over it because there’s so little holding power for residue there.* Anything you leave in the dessert will lose its form pretty quickly. A fairy can sustain their own form in the dessert for a while, and maybe a few things they’re holding on to, but the more stuff they try to bring with them the harder it is to make sure none of it falls apart and sinks into the landscape. A desert-faring vessel, then, is designed to of “float” like little oasis of coherency in a sea of dissolution. You can put stuff in it, and it will hold. You can chill in it without worrying that your body might start to go a little fuzzy at the edges if you’re not thinking about it.
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*The layers of residue that make it up have been purged (read: sterilized/killed, but not in the way that stuff “normally” dies in faerie) for so far down that it’s effectively a parched void sponge that drains the life out of anything you try to put there. The most it can hold (and this probably because the residue hasn’t quite been purged all the way down (if it had been then it wouldn’t exist at all) ) is a really flat crusty landscape with some very basic spacial dimensions, directionality, and laws governing it (like: a feeble attempt at gravity). It can be a very useful sort of space, though. If you want to practice a spell in perfect isolation from other confounding variables, that’s the place to go: you just need to bring all the materials you’ll need and make sure you run the experiment before things start going wobbly (you can recreate a comparably sterile environment in a lab, but it’s really hard). It can also serve as a convenient site for dumping waste or Destroying The Evidence or Disposing of Cursed Objects and so forth. Fairies from the wild lands do this all the time. Some are powerful and clever enough to create items (like the boats) that can withstand (for a while) the unmaking effect of the desert, but it’s pretty rare. Crossover where we throw the One Ring into the desert and see how long it lasts. (Also it’s now occurring to me that Nox and Jezebel probably do some scavenging in boats at the edge of the desert, hoping to salvage up anything that might be useful before it dissolves).
