The Arbornauts

Sail the mythic world tree - the Tree of Life - in this Technomagical Kids on Bikes character creation module and hack. This was created for the Magic School jam but it has inspired a whole interesting world so I will be creating a proper hack beyond just this character creator, and writing about the world I made up for it.

This is still semi under construction and feedback is very welcomed.

For the vibe, see below...

Marlee remembered the day her uncle returned the first time. She was waiting with her mother down at the dock, a flat barge, wheeled so that the ships could be taken back into the hangar.

She remembered the sounds the most. First the sound of the Tether line as the ship approached, a melody so hauntingly beautiful it made her guts ache. It sounded like voices singing, but they were not coming from any people she could see. She didn’t understand it at the time, and to this day, though she understands it more, that sound still produces in her the same longing, the same ache. Which she supposed was the same for everyone who heard it - that was its purpose, in a way.

The sound of an indrawn breath - then, shooting up from the dock, thousands of beacon lines, blue, irridescent, extending with a hiss into seemingly empty air, followed by the lightning-bolt slam of the Tether line slashing its way into existence. She remembered trying to work out exactly where it had come from, where its start point was. Did it start from up and go down, or was it the other way around? And here was where she remembered her mother’s grip on her hand tighten. She looked up to see tension in the normally carefree, smiling face. She learned later that this was the moment when everything could go wrong - why there had to be so many beacon lines, as the ship wrestled between this place and the World Tree, and the thousand thousand possible outcomes of its questing.

Then the pinpoint of light that heralded the ship grew and dwindled again with a sound like a wave, and the tinkling, breathy sound of the circular sail apparatus faded slowly into her hearing. And there was her uncle, framed by clear blue sky, pulling in the Lead Line and the Tether and packing up the Skirr as the other sailors clambered on the mast, drawing in the sails. Pulling his silver chain gloves from his fingers as he scanned the crowd. Spotting her and her mother and giving a wave and a brief, tired smile before getting on with the business of docking. Her mother gave a laugh of relief and delight and they waved back, Marlee chatting excitedly about everything she’d just seen and heard.

That evening at dinner he regaled them with stories from his time on the Tree of Life, beyond the seen world. But in all his stories there would come a point where he would struggle to put into words what he had seen. What it was like.

Later, as Marlee thought back to that moment, she would come to realise it was that seed of curiosity, the desire to know for herself, that brought her to the doors of the School of Arbornautics and Dendrology to study, and, one day, sail on a magic ship into that other place. Not just to hear about it, or read about it, not just to understand. But to really know. To soak her bones in it.

And, despite everything, she still thinks it was worth the trouble...