User:Yuanchosaan/How to

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Obtaining the moon
This ingredient can only be harvested on a clear night, when the moon is caught between half-empty and half-full. Find a cottage covered in ivy, its whole façade sagging beneath the weight of greenery, except for the iron bars of its gates that still stand straight and strong as ivy twines around it.

The gate will open to your touch.

Walk through each room. All remnants of ancient human habitation should be lost to the softening blanket of dust, like figures covered in snow. It could be from any time: a rough bowl of terracotta, or the sleek, industrial shape of mass-produced plastic; a harpsichord or an electronic piano, this blanket of wool or felt or nylon. Do not let your curiosity or desire for specificity overwhelm you. Touch nothing.

In one room, there will be a tree. Whether the house grew around the tree or the tree has taken advantage of the abandonment of the house is not your concern. The tiles will be neatly displaced around it, and the tree’s crown will have broken through its ceiling.

It is preferred that the tree be a rowan, but elm, yew and eucalyptus are acceptable alternatives,

Never climb an oak.

Climb the tree. You are permitted no aid – no rope, no spikes, nothing but your bare hands and feet. Climb beyond the roof, beyond the clinging ivy, until you are nearly upon the branches too slender to bear your weight.

Above your head, there should be a branch that splits equally into two spokes. In the distance, the edge of a mountain will provide the third side of the triangle. The triangle should be as equilateral as possible.

When the moon is caught between the branches and the mountain, take a mirror and hold it so that you have created a false full moon, a moon with symmetry that would never be tolerated by nature.

Then take thumb and forefinger, and pluck the moon from the sky.

Obtaining the fern
Find a world in the process of being consumed by a shadow biosphere. Wander through a city that is becoming a jungle from that other world, that universe eclipsing our own. Walk through the abandoned streets, in dappled sunlight of shadows cast from unseen trees, dodging invisible roots that have torn up the concrete pavement, the roads, the pipes, all the detritus that will no longer be useful in the new world. All the people have long since fled, though there is nowhere left to run.

Enjoy the silence. This is strictly not necessary, but one seldom has a chance to truly relish silence. There are no more cars here, with their endless city wailing. No footsteps but yours. Without the humans, there is no trash – no more pigeons or other scavenging birds. Only the skyscrapers are left to choke out the breezes.

The breeze has not yet made it from the other world.

You are waiting, rather than walking. The walking is just to kill time.

Kill time until you begin to detect the first scents of budding growth. It is a rich, dark scent, a fragrance of rotting, slimy things and loamy soil that is not unpleasant despite its associations – perhaps because it makes you think more of new life than of dying. After all, isn’t decomposition just the process of life generation?

The shadows are beginning to swarm around you. They are nothing but a suggestion of grey for now – a branch that wavers into existence and then disappears, a coiling tendril stretching out towards a strange sun, a car that suddenly transforms into a lichen covered rock. A leaf falls against your face, still invisible, and you feel the droplet of moisture it carries trickle down your neck.

A vast, black forest, towering taller than the skyscrapers ever did, so stark that the snatches of sky between the trunks look white. But you hold your breath, somehow sensing that what you see as black now will at any moment burst into rapturous shades of lurid purples and yellows, leaves of azure spiked with veins of scarlet and green flowers that drop drifting clouds of green pollen.

So when the first lavender fern unfolds itself in the crook of what was once an apartment complex, you are ready to jump upon it, plucking the new life from the old.

Above you, an alien bird cries out a rattling song of joy.

Obtaining metallic dust
There are two main options for obtaining this ingredient. You may preference one above the other according to your talents or predilections.

If you are best suited to travelling, find a world upon which machinery is progressing at a rapid pace. Absence of humanoid lifeforms is often of benefit. This method has the benefit of being faster, as one does not need to go through multiple iterations oneself.

If you are best suited to artifice, create your own artificial intelligence. Aim for a level that is prior to true sentience – it is better to undershoot and progress through a number of iterations than to overshoot and have to deal with a rogue AI. Though this method is more time-consuming, one has the advantage of being able to generate a customised specimen that can be more easily processed.

The robot should be on the brink of developing a soul. Each day, ask who it is.

When it can answer, immediately deactivate it. Take the motherboard and crush it into a fine dust. Place in a glass vial.

Obtaining the feather
Take a jewelled hummingbird’s egg and hatch it against the warmth of your skin. Feed the chick only the sweetest of soursop fruits and pommeracs that you have harvested with your own hands. House it in a nest built of spider’s silk. For a whole month, do not let the nestling leave your sight.

On the day that the chick first flies, pluck from it a single flight feather.

Then let the bird fly free. We are not savages.

Obtaining wire of silvered steel
For information on obtaining this ingredient, please refer to Appendix Q: Bargaining with the Underground. The authors implore you to remember not to promise too much, particularly in the way of souls.

Obtaining the water
The entrance can be found in any body of water which has once touched the sea. It is beneficial to seek one in which the connection is ancient; however, providing one has enough sensitivity, even a dish of seawater left to sit overnight will be sufficient.

Little by little, submerge yourself into that primordial ocean that connects all bodies of water, across all worlds. Let the ripples lap against the legs of your chairs, stain your carpets indelibly, fill your apartment with the sharp tang of salt and seaweed. The light softens with the ever-shifting pattern of the waves, with its comforting illusion of regularity. All the noises around you fade into the dulled, distant quality of sound bent by water.

Remember that blood is water, and in water is the echo of that sea.

When you take your next breath, you will find yourself at the bottom of a vast and fathomless sea.

Do not let yourself think of cold or warmth – the water is neither, but if you think of cold, then you will think of depth, and the tonnes of water that are crushing down upon you. Do not think of light or dark, for the sea is at the exact median between the two, a murky half-light that drains all colour, illuminates nothing, hides everything.

Far above you, there is a dazzling shift in the murk that may be the surface.

We advise you not to look up.

There are things that live in the primordial sea, without shape or name, circling endlessly close to the untouchable surface. Look up, and you will see their rippling shapes bright against the dimness or dark against the glow, depending on your point of view. It is impossible to guess how large they are; they look vast even from the bottom of the ocean, and if you watch, they will grow only larger, descending silently upon the sunless plain until the twilight arrives to swallow you.

Best to ignore them. It will not stop them from consuming you if they spot you, but better for one’s peace of mind. These beings are not yours to know.

Your role is to be the bottomfeeder. It is not so bad a life, for a short time. Press your belly against the soft, slippery sand, letting it cushion you, blur your edges. Worm your way through it, seeing nothing but silt, tasting it, ears clogged by sand and silence.

Blind to all but magic, let yourself be led to the shores of a sea beneath the sea, where waves of brine lap against a shore of dead tubeworms. Only then should you allow yourself to crouch.

Take an earthenware jar and fill it only with the water of the sea beneath the sea. Then, following the trail your squirming body formed, return to the kinder world that knows the sun.

Instructions

 * 1) The initial steps of this recipe are best performed inside. Access to a fume closet, if possible, is encouraged.
 * 2) Empty the earthenware jar into a small cast iron cauldron. Slowly bring to boil atop an open flame.
 * 3) Slowly add the metal dust, stirring until the filaments are completely dissolved.
 * 4) The fern should be finely chopped and placed into a teabag. Allow to steep for sixty-five minutes exactly. Do not breathe in the fumes.
 * 5) Remove the cauldron. Lightly crisp the feather above the flame, then replace the cauldron. Release the feather from a height of 1.22 metres, allowing it to float onto the surface of the mixture.
 * 6) Weep.
 * 7) Weave a net from the wire of silvered steel. Encase the moon in it.
 * 8) Submerge the moon just beneath the surface as it simmers. Suspend it there for as long as you can hold your breath.
 * 9) When you lift the moon up, it will be neither light nor dark, but the shade which is exactly between the two.
 * 10) From the remains of the silvered steel wire, crafting a necklace to hang the moon from.
 * 11) Tie it around the neck of the intended as they slumber. Let them sleep three days and three nights with it against their skin.
 * 12) Bury it in the furthest corner of your garden, in a place that receives only dappled sunlight. Do not water.
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