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Promise settles in. Her garden grows. Her tree grows; she stores her map and the rest of the notebook in there, first, and after she's been there for seven days, she can fit inside it herself. (At that early stage it's only an improvement over the outdoors when it's raining, but it's her tree. It'll get bigger.) She slowly broadens her diet as she learns the peculiar local plants and which ones she likes. She coaxes her tree into flower, picks one and ensorcels it, wraps cottony fluff from one of her trees in a giant flower petal of the same kind her bag is made of, and she has a pillow. The other flowers turn into haw berries that taste like home. She practices fairylights and then more complicated spells all around her new turf with her map, then without, until she has it memorized by feel and by the response of the magic when she casts.
When she doesn't need to do magic to her plants every single day to get and keep them producing at a rate sufficient to sustain her, she goes to the library and tells them things about the continent she came from in exchange for a half-century's membership. She brings home books. She makes paper to take notes on.
She doesn't have any near neighbors, but she has distant ones, and she trades foreign seeds and candied dewdrops for glass and books. She drinks her stream and writes her thoughts (a lot of her thoughts are about Arcane). She decompresses. She reads and thinks.
Time goes by. It's dark at night; sometimes she watches the stars.
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imeanforever
infinitely-stranger
"I wonder if this problem is solvable with sorcery. I wonder that about most problems," he says, smiling wryly.
imeanforever
"I've thought about it. I haven't gotten anywhere. Unless it took mental sorcery you'd be likelier to come up with something than me, of course."
infinitely-stranger
"I wouldn't be inclined to guess mental sorcery would help."
infinitely-stranger
"I don't have a good guess about what would help, but now I'm going to think about it."
infinitely-stranger
"I don't see why more people aren't. But I think sometimes they can't afford to be."
infinitely-stranger
"It's not as though thinking about how to solve interesting problems with sorcery is any kind of hardship for me. I don't lose anything by being nice. What I really don't understand is people who could be nice just as easily but deliberately pass up the opportunity."
infinitely-stranger
"I wasn't thinking of any specific examples. But, oh, any good sorcerer who isn't being actively prevented will eventually come across opportunities to do someone a favour, and, hmm... it seems the calculation is not 'will the benefit to this person be worth my time and effort' but 'what am I going to get out of it and is it enough for me to bother'. Observably it often isn't. I cannot fathom the mindset."
imeanforever
"I was trying to help a mortal get home when Thorn caught me and I don't think the experience has made me nicer."
infinitely-stranger
"That's a different problem entirely. And if there's a solution it is beyond my means."
imeanforever
"I think the gate's probably still there, standing open, not far from my first tree. I think the mortal may be dead but I didn't see much of her after we were caught."
infinitely-stranger
"Perhaps I'll go by and see about closing it. Having open gates lying around to be stumbled through does no one any good."
infinitely-stranger
"And it'll be good practice. Gates can be interestingly tricky."
imeanforever
"It took me weeks to learn to make one when that was nearly the only thing I did with my time."
imeanforever
"And then it took a long time to settle, which I'm guessing isn't usually a problem you'd have if you made them."
