When you verse, your equipment stays in the same general location relative to you. So if something was 20 feet away from you when you versed, it would be 20 feet away from you when you arrived, correct? Suppose all of your equipment was in a 100 story building. You're on the ground, and get killed by a mugger. That means your equipment would fall 100 stories when you versed, because it would still be 100 stories up. That's right isn't it? Do versers ever lose their equipment to situations like that? I imagine falling 100 stories would break just about everything I have. Has this ever happened to anyone?
On the same token, what if you were standing underneath your equipment? It falls 100 stories, lands on you and kills you again. That would be a bad time versing.
Or on the same line, what if you had a knife that was sitting in the other room. You verse and land on the Mary Piper spaceship, and where that knife was is where a wall is now. Would the knife be stuck in the wall? If so, would it fused to the wall, or could you maybe pull it out and leave a hole in the wall?
Back to the 100 story building question. If you were in the top of that 100 story building, and your equipment was on the ground. You verse out. That means that when you arrive, your equipment is now buried 100 stories below ground because it was 100 stories below you, right?
In these situations, your equipment usually ends up in an empty space of some kind, much in the same way that you never verse into the inside of a wall yourself. Perhaps there's an underground cave or river your equipment versed into; perhaps you're at the top of a cliff and your equipment is at the bottom. Perhaps, instead of versing into the Mary Piper twenty feet away from the wall, you versed in twenty-two or eighteen feet away, and your knife is either fully inside or fully outside of the space ship.
Equipment has ended up in orbit, or at the bottom of the ocean, or inside a cardboard box. I'm not sure about falling a hundred stories, but I wouldn't be surprised.
If I remember right from Verse Three Chapter One, Kondor verses into Sherwood Forest. Some of his equipment was on an upper floor of the place he was at before, and some of it ends up in the tops of trees in Sherwood Forest. I'd have to read the book again to be 100% that is what happened, but if it is, that would support the falling 100 stories hypothesis.
Which way is "up" when you switch dimensions? (Especially if you left or arrive in space) Perhaps your equipment, instead of appearing 100 stories in the air, will appear "100 stories" (about 1000 feet) *north*, or *left*, or...
Vverry good, Llarry. You'd think that after Ender's Game, I'd have thought of that . . .
Yeah, I hadn't thought of that one. Good point. If you were in the northern hemisphere on your first verse, and landed in the southern hemisphere, what was up would now be down. Good point.
Yes, I've done all of those things.
I'm usually nice about equipment, putting things where you can get them--but Kelly nee Tessena Keck will remember the time the Architect Scriff-mailed her a bible, and it wound up floating outside a portal on the spaceship and had to be retrieved. I have let stuff drop and be damaged in the process, and I have known of stuff versing in in such a way that it was physically buried. I don't do a lot of those things in the books because it's usually boring, and I don't do it in the games unless someone has so much stuff that I want to make it difficult in some way to keep track of it all.
--M. J. Young
I remember also that when I first arrived in the verse, some of my stuff was at my parents' place (northwestern PA), and the rest of it was at college near Philly, about 300 miles away. I think one of my adventures in NagaWorld was getting the rest of my gear.
It's good to see you back again, Kelly. I've missed you. Trust all is well, including Matt.
And yes, it often happens that part of the adventure is recovering the equipment, and sometimes equipment is temporarily unrecoverable--which does not make it useless, because you then have a directional vector you can reference that no one else can detect and no one else can move. You'll get it back in another universe--eventually, probably.
--M. J. Young
Paul had a cell phone in orbit during Omega Academy. It didn't end up being much use to him, and I think he abandoned it between 'verses. (Its battery was out, I think. Oh, and it had fallen out of his pocket when said pocket was burned away by a coral bush, so I think he assumed it was broken.)