Scene 10

From his little clearing, Fyndraxis could see a modest amount of sky. As the planet rotated, his point of view changed, as if he were a passenger cruising along in an unbearably slow sportscar, seat reclined, taking in the sights through the sunroof. This patch of night sky slewed across the universe revealing the only real thing that distant stars have to offer, information.
Given time, which he seemed to have an abundance of, and enough stellar information, he might be able to figure out generally where he was. The distant stars would be no real help in this, but closer cosmic neighbors could jump in and lend a hand. Distant features like the Milky Way or the Pleiades might as well be holes poked in the dome of the night, they are distant and unchanging. Closer objects like planets tend to be brighter and do complicated and mysterious things. That’s why most of them are named after deities.
Two of these deities were visible this evening, namely Mars and Jupiter. They happened to be in the southern sky. This told Fyndraxis that he was either very far north, or very far south. Probably very far north, because this was summer. The solar system has an equator of sorts, this is called the plane of the ecliptic. This is the plane that planets generally tend to orbit on. If the sun were to wear a skirt and do a fiery pirouette, all of the planets would get a face full of pleats.
The Earth, assuming that’s where he was, has an axial tilt of about 24.5 degrees. At night, we face away from the sun, and because of this tilt are sort of reclined, so to get a good look at this skirt, we need to look to the southern sky. Also, the constellation Orion was right side up, and that was kind of a dead give away. So that narrowed down his location to generally north somewhere. Which wasn’t very helpful.
Seeing the stars made him think about distance. Because he didn’t know where he was and how far away people might be, his strategy for rescue should probably focus on light. Being in a forest, sound wouldn’t carry very well. Forests are designed to consume errant waveforms and make use of them and sound doesn’t really stand a chance. Light on the other hand, is a more determined force and can be seen from lightyears away, so it was probably a better bet.
He decided that every evening for an hour or two, he would put on a light show. This would probably inspire curiosity in whatever locals were around and they would be inclined to come and check out what was causing it. From there he could convince somebody to get him out of here.
Day came once again, and he spent some time getting up to speed with the light show that he was planning for the next evening. It was complicated work, but he made steady progress and was able to produce more colors than just white light. Hugin and Munin returned to see if there were any leftovers. They did a very thorough job for a couple of hours and seemed to find a scrap or two.
When evening began to fall once again, Fyndraxis prepared for his lightshow. This had to be done at the right time. If it happened too close to sunset, there may have been too much ambient light for it to be noticed. If he waited too late, everyone would be asleep.
While he was waiting for the right time to begin, he saw an errant star moving across the sky. Under normal stellar circumstances, this would not happen. This star moved in a steady line from south to north, plodding its way across the sky. It couldn’t be a star, and unless something gravitationally drastic had happened, it couldn’t be a planet either. This was something closer. Something in the thrall of the Earth’s gravity. This was a satellite in a polar orbit.
Fyndraxis racked his mind for everything he knew about satellites. They were artifacts of high technology, typically not the result of efforts of people wearing burlap. They were a modern thing, like his computer. They could be used for communication or observation, but either way, they had to have some sort of way to disseminate the information that they possessed, or else what was the point? They typically used radio to communicate because the logistics of running a wire up to orbit was a non-starter. He was pretty sure his computer had a radio, though before now he had no real reason to use it.
He retreated to his Sanctum, reveling in the opportunity to respire. He had been growing used to these bouts of apnea, and while he didn’t enjoy them, they were becoming less and less panic inducing. His computer was covered in a thick layer of dust and he used his ecstatic breaths to blow off the monitor and keyboard.
He spent a while tracking down and implementing the radio functionality, and had to refer to the internal manual that his computer kept in its memory a couple of times to get up to speed. Once everything was fired up and working, he was able to scan through the electromagnetic spectrum for signals of note. He was greeted with nothing more than standard issue radio static that the universe provided free of charge to anyone that cared to listen.
Because of the temporal difference between his inner realm and the outer reality, this sound came through as a meaty bass hum, punctuated by the occasional slow pop or toothy hiss. He had no idea what frequency a random satellite of unknown function would be broadcasting on, so he scanned the spectrum a number of times to try to track down his quarry. He received nothing of note, but was happy to have another tool to dick around with.
He was surprised that he didn’t hear any humans on the radio talking about the weather or playing music of some kind. The part of the radio spectrum that usually carried that information was as empty as the rest. Faced with a sort of Fermi-esque befuddlement, he went about the business of adding another mental toggle switch and a dial to his growing toolkit.
So far, he had some vibrational shenanigans that he could get up to resulting in sound, the future possibility of a light show for anyone that cared to see it, and he could listen to his radio and try to track down whatever signals were screaming through the void. Not too bad for a sword in a raspberry bush.