It is pitch dark.

You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

....He waves a hand in front of his face.  He doesn't see anything, and several seconds too late he realizes how much that would have sucked, if his stinging palm had been bleeding - but it's not, and he's fine.  Still, probably smarter to stay close to the ground.  He'll feel around the floor a little; what's the texture like around him?  - And what's that noise.

Oh, it's probably nothing. It certainly looks like nothing.

The floor is rock, with some weirdly smooth parts marking it as probably a natural cave shaped by water.

His track record is not great here but maybe he can stand up and walk.  Away from the noise.  As fast as he can while attempting to feel out where his feet are going before he puts any weight on them.

He bonks his head on the ceiling as soon as he tries to stand up more than about 80% of the way, and then something flomphs noiselessly onto his head and over his face. Squeeeeeeeze.

Ow.  - And, oh, crap.  What on Earth is happening to him.  Why are so many things happening to him - can he get it off, can he - thrash around at all usefully - if he bangs his head at the ceiling or - ow, a wall - does that - seem like it's making any progress towards getting the thing off of him -

Banging his head on surfaces does in fact make the thing react, though not, like, in a way that involves letting him go. Maybe it would if he did it a few more times?

And then his forehead is so cold it feels hot, like some kind of externally-applied brain freeze, and the flomphing thing shrivels up in a way that incidentally exposes his mouth, and there's a girl's voice, and a hand presumably belonging to the same individual, ripping the thing off his head.

....oh .....good.

He's going to lie here and cough about that.

Words words words?

"Hnnng - guh?"

Oh, crap.  Now he's definitely bleeding, and at least some of it's on his face so it doesn't matter where his hand is - he should not throw up.  It would be so, so great if he didn't throw up on his incomprehensible maybe-rescuer.  Probably he's concussed, that must be why he can't understand her.  ...This is so bad.  (And he should not throw up.)

The sound of her breathing drops - maybe she's bent down for some reason - and there's a scraping noise, and then -

- light! She's holding a rock and it's GLOWING!

- Ow.  Bright.

He swallows and attempts a, "Hi."  It's only somewhat gurgley.  "Thanks."

Words words? Sigh. She waves her hand in a finger-wiggly sort of way and says more words. The thing - looks more like an octopus than most things do - that was probably the thing suffocating him twitches, and she says more words and does a finger-gun at it and it ices over and goes still.

That's terrifying!  In many ways less so than other things that have happened to him in the past few minutes, but still terrifying.  ...Is she gray, or maybe green or something; at first he thought that was just the light but his own skin doesn't seem to be doing that...

- Actually he does feel pretty green himself.  He loses the battle against his nausea, though he at least manages to first roll over and face away from the scary lady who saved him.

She does not look impressed with this. She picks up the dead strangly thing by its least icy tentacle, puts it in her knapsack, and pulls from the bag a large cloth rectangle, which may genuinely be grey. She shakes it out to its full large rectangleness, and makes to wrap him in it, occasionally uttering words.

He is, objectively, extremely unimpressive right now.  The blanket's nice to have; he scoots in a direction conducive to not getting vomit on it.  "Thank you.  And, uh, sorry."

And now she's gesturing for him to get up on his feet. She's dropped her glowing rock on the ground.

He can pick up the rock and attempt to stand, yeah.  Does it look like she wants it back?

No, the rock is all his but she has opinions about where they go - no, no, they will go there AFTER his incredibly bizarre clothes are all wrapped up in this big cloak so nobody looks too close.

...Sure, okay; he's not really sure what that's about but it's fine - how does she react if he tries to collect his duffel bag from where it fell off during the octopussing?

Oh, she's not thrilled about that. She frowns at it, tapping her chin. Will it fit under the cloak without showing off his shoes... not really. Can some of the objects fit in her bag so that the rest of them and the duffel itself can go under the cloak?

Yeah, it's not huge.

"Sorry."

Encouraging smile when he says words! Object-rearranging. She pauses to take a closer look at a bunch of the objects but eventually has some of them tucked away in her bag and the rest munched into a compact arrangement under the cloak he's borrowing. She inspects him and deems him acceptable to follow her. Beckon beckon.

Oh, okay.  A smile.  That's... better than he was expecting.

Follow follow!  Kind of slowly, and with regular bumps into the side of the cave's wall.  And occasional trampling on the cloak's hem that sends him pitching forward.

- hand on the shoulder to stop him. More waving and she boops him on the nose. Words words. Also, his FEET are RIGHT THERE, it's suddenly more obvious than it's ever been in his life exactly where his feet are.

There have been so many THINGS HAPPENING that he didn't get particularly splotchy about her previous handling of him, but now he definitely is.  Maybe he can angle the light away from his face, while still illuminating his path, while not doing whatever the girl doesn't want done with this cloak?  Hm, maybe not.

....What on earth is up with his feet.  Whaaaat is haaaappening.  He can just - move them?  Like that???

He's still too nauseated and head-woundy to go fast per se, but his pace is substantially improved.  Weird.

She makes a - warning? - gesture as they approach the sound of other voices, speaking the ?same? language as her. Digs around in her bag and finally rips a hook-shaped thing off the ceiling octopus and uses it to clip the cloak closed, muttering to herself. Beckon beckon.

There are a handful of people, all about the same weird color and ear-shape as her, in the next chamber. His rock is the only source of light, but that doesn't seem to have impeded any of them in the moments before he walked into the room with it, even though they're hanging out sewing and one of them is reading a book. They look up and a couple speak to her; they glance briefly at him and then say more things to her rather than nodding to him or anything. She replies and ushers him along through the cave into the next tunnel section.

Sure, he can go along with this.  Her clipping the cloak shut gives him a more confident guess about what that whole deal is, and he can shuffle slouchily past the gray people without revealing the toes of his sneakers.  (Or tripping!)  And fine, okay, pointy-eared people can see in the dark, that makes about as much sense as everything else.

There are more tunnels and twisty little passages, though they're mostly big enough to stand up all the way in. Some of the twisty little packages have doors set into them, others have curtains. There are stairs, mostly down, though there are also many opportunities to take stairs up which she is ignoring. There are foreign symbols etched on the walls here and there. She pauses occasionally when no one's around to re-do the Noseboop of Foot Obviousness.

He blotchifies a bit every time, but gives up on hiding it.  The risk of failing to hide his apparently sinful-or-something Monty Python T-shirt is apparently too great.

Also, going down instead of up: not thrilling.

Well, if he doesn't comment on it she can't make any reassuring noises.

Eventually she goes through one of the doors. There are some people of her species in there, and some teeny-tiny people, like about waist-high on Beau but proportioned like adults. She has a slightly extended conversation with the women and one of the men about something that may or may not include Beau in its scope. The tiny people don't speak; they're cooking and scrubbing out iron cookware with sand and presumably before Beau and his glowing rock got there they were managing with the faint light from the coals.

Or maybe they can see in the dark, too.  He doesn't quite know what to make of the skin colors on the midgets being pretty normal human ones; he'd figured that the grayness wasn't just a trick of the light but it's still different to see someone who isn't him without it.  Maybe most people here paint themselves.  (...And have pointy ears for some other reason.)

The conversation goes on for a while. At one point it's definitely about Beau. They talk over each other a little. Finally, his rescuer beckons him through this room, down another tunnel, and into a room that doesn't have anyone else in it. There's a hammock hanging from the ceiling with a nightstand sort of situation carved into the nearest wall, and a similar bookshelf on the other side of the room, and a storage trunk, and what might be a chamber pot. It doesn't have a door or a curtain but she takes the cloak back and hangs it up from some hooks that are convenient located.

The conversation is deeply concerning but it doesn't seem like trying to do anything would help.

Oh good, this looks kind of like an endpoint.  If he starts making to lie back down on this bit of cave floor does that get him stopped or sent any scary looks or anything like that.

No, he can sit, and she's also now taking out his other possessions from her bag and putting them near his duffel. Words words words?

He's going to lie all the way down and put his face on the stone, actually.  He feels both too warm and too cold but between the blanket and the cloak, putting a cool thing on his face (or, the reverse) sounds incredibly appealing right now.

"Thanks," he says of his objects.  And adds an "I think," of the conversation.

Encouraging smile! Words? Words words?

...Huh.  Yeah, he can do words.  "My name is Beau."  He taps his chest.  "Beau."  Point.  "You?"

"Belmarniss." Encouraging gesture.

"Hi Belmarniss.  I..... don't know what else to say when we can't understand each other."

She cups her hand over her ear and makes more big encouraging gestures.

Oh boy. "Uh - 'The year 1866 was signalised by a remarkable incident, a mysterious, and, puzzling phenomenon, which, um - doubtless no one has yet forgotten'?"

......what is that about.

"Sorry, I'd be better at picking things to say if I knew why you wanted me to..."

Ear cupping!

"Can you understand me??"

Great big smile! (Look, she doesn't know that nodding is crosscultural.)

"Is that a way concussions can work?  With me being able to say things but not understand them."

Headshake. She picks up the hook she got off the ceiling octopus and makes it light up too.

"Okay."  He sits up.

"Um, my full name is Beau Swan; I'm from Phoenix, Arizona - though I was just moving somewhere else..."  What sort of reaction does that get.

"Fenixarizona?"

"Yeah!"

...gesture that might mean "talk about that more please".

Shrug.  "I lived there until today.  I was just leaving the airport when there was some sort of - giant snake monster, with a mirror for a face, and it sent me to about where you found me.  ...That's why I have the duffle bag; it has half of pretty much all my stuff in it."

When he says 'giant snake monster with a mirror for a face' she gets up and pulls out one of her books and starts flipping through it. When he says 'duffle bag' she points at it with a questioning eyebrow.

"Yeah, that.  It's mostly clothes, and a few books."

"Mm-hm." Flip flip flip. The book looks handwritten, with hand-drawn pictures, all in black and white.

Wow.

He doesn't actually feel like talking much right now.  He might still do it without active encouragement, but he's definitely not going to interrupt her from another activity twice.

She gets to a page in the book. The pictures show a variety of weird snakes, but none of them have mirrors for faces. "Hm?"

"No."  He points to one of the pictures.  "It was about that size, though."

"Huh." She flips through the rest of the book and then puts it back, shrugging. Pulls another one with maps in it. "Fenixarizona?" she asks, holding it out.

"....No."  He clears his throat.  "It's not on here."

...flip flip flip flip?

To what?  (Is it rude of him to be looking - no, probably it's fine.)

There are vaguer outlines of other continents in here.

That one if you squint looks kind of vaguely like - but, "No."

She sighs. She points out a spot on the continents she tried first and indicates the room around them. "Noctimar."

"Noctimar," he nods.  "Phoenix is in Arizona, in the United States.  Which is on Earth."

Her atlas has a picture of Golarion from space. She taps it. "Golarion."

"Okay.  We're in Noctimar, on Golarion."  This is again less alarming than previous things that have happened recently but feels more so.  For some reason.

Nod nod. Sigh. Atlas goes away.

This information is not really helping detract from all of the ways in which he already feels kind of bad.  "...Do you have something I can use to wash - this - off?"

"Mm -" She casts a spell again and starts focusing on his octopus goo and blood situation. It disappears as she focuses on each icky spot.

...Wow.

"Thanks.  And, um - so, you have superpowers?"

"Mm-hm."

"How special is that, here?"

Shrug. Handwobble.

"All the people with skin like yours and pointy ears have it?" he guesses.  He's not going to try and name the color.

"Drow," she says. Handwobble.

"Do people like me ever have superpowers?"

Smile.

It occurs to Beau that smiling meaning yes seems to be the thing that's happening, and that he should fix this right away and probably should have several minutes ago.

"So, uh, how do you say yes in - whatever language you speak?"

"Jeh."

"And no?"

"Pon."

He nods.  "Does everyone in," he has already forgotten the place names, "here have superpowers, then?"

"Pon." She grabs a slate and chalk. It's not a high precision medium but she has sketching practice and can doodle ten pointy-eared human-proportioned people and ten of the tiny people in a separate row, then circle four of the ten pointy eared ones and none of the little ones. "Drow," she adds, pointing at a pointy ear, "mekta," pointing at the circle, "shenta," the little-people row.

"Some drow have powers, and no shenta do?"

"Ehh...." She disappears all the chalk on the slate like she disappeared the goop on Beau's person and draws fifty dots. "Shenta." She circles one. "Mekta shentin!"

"Oh, okay.  And what about humans?" 

She selectively erases the circle, declares the same dots "humans", and circles five of them, but with a handwobble.

"Wow."  He's not sure what to make of that, in comparison to the other rates.  "...I have a lot of questions, but most of them are bad.  Like I think you probably can't answer them."  Why didn't he mention this before - "Superpowers aren't - real, where I'm from."

Surprised blink!

"Are people here born with them, or do they get them somehow?"

She draws a box around one of the five encircled dots.

...What?  Oh.  "You mean some of them are born with it, but not most."

"Jeh!"

"How do people get them?"

She waggles the chalk and slate a little. How is she supposed to explain that like this.

"Sorry."

She clears off the slate again. Sighs. Draws some more. First a sketch of the room they're in, hammock and shelf and curtain. Then a stick figure of Beau, with prominent round ears. An arrow through the curtain - violently scribbled out. She gestures at the drawing; does he understand?

"You mean I shouldn't leave?"

"Jeh."

"Will anyone else come in?"

Handwobble.

He's going splotchy again.  "Is there anything I should do if that happens?  That, um, you can say.  Or draw."

"Pon."

"Okay."

She taps the picture again, then gets up.

Yeah, he'll stay here on the floor.  He unduffles the book he was reading on the plane but ends up spending more time staring at the page or the wall than making progress through it.

He'd been reacting to things as they happened, since landing in Port Angeles.  Without any of those... his head hurts.  It would probably be sane to question whether any of this is real.  But he knows what he's seeing.  The ceiling octopus didn't get him that bad, but it definitely did get him; he's sure of it.

Then the light goes out.

It doesn't make any difference, really.  He puts the book away; it's not like he was reading it in the first place.  He wonders about Charlie, whether he got teleported as well.  Beau hopes his few seconds of diversion were enough.  And his mom is going to be totally freaking out.

Ugh.

The stone floor is finally getting uncomfortable and he feels cold; he moves to sit on top of his bag and buries his face in his hands, elbows on knees, his throat tight.

One of the shenta comes in to exchange the chamber pot for a fresh one after a while. (He can tell this is what's happening because one of the buttons on the shentin's clothes is glowing.)

Okay.  It's very relieving when they leave.

They (it's kind of hard to discern a gender, they do not seem attired in a way designed to communicate that to, at least, Beau) do kind of stare at him for a minute, but then move on, taking the light with them.

He hadn't already resigned himself to being quite this alone in quite this dark, but he'd done that a little.  He's fine.

(Will he ever see the sun again?  Will he die down here, soon, or will he be stuck in the black for years upon years?)

Eventually the girl's been gone long enough that he figures it's worth it to get up enough to kneel at his bag and fumble around for an extra layer to put on.  Then it's back to (warmer) sitting.

She's back a couple of hours later, though it's not obvious it's her till she lights a convenient pebble again, since she doesn't enter with one. She does that, then sits down with a book she pulls from her bag, and a scroll she produces likewise.

"Hi."  His eyes are maybe a little wild.

Spell-cast. Ear-cup-gesture.

"Uh, how was your trip?"  He spent some of the time trying to come up with useful questions.  It didn't work.

She raises her scroll in slightly ironic triumph.

"Cool."  Okay, he can shut up now.

Okay if he doesn't have any yes-or-no questions or anything urgent to tell her she will pull a folding chair-and-desk arrangement out of a niche by her bookshelf. It looks like it may be constructed out of bones. She lays out her book on it, and her scroll, and starts - copying the one into the other?

Doesn't really seem like he needs to talk for this to happen.  (Bones??  Bones.)

He adds another layer after a minute, now that he can see well enough to search for a sweatshirt.

She notices that but apparently doesn't have any more layers for him apart from the cloak that doubles as a door-curtain. Scrawl scrawl.

Partway through this a shentin comes in with a bowl of stew for her. She speaks to them and they look at Beau and nod and go get one for him too. It's mostly mushrooms, some fish.

"Thank you."  He digs a granola bar out of the side pocket of the duffel and offers it to her, when he's done.

She blinks at it, sniffs it, beams, and accepts it. She savors that granola bar like it's ambrosia.

He is going to live down here forever and never taste anything really good ever again, isn't he.  "I have a bunch more.  You can have them."  Fistful of granola bars.  "My mom didn't like the flavor."

She kind of hugs the granola bars. She doesn't eat another one right away, just carefully puts them in a compartment of her storage trunk and goes back to work on her scroll situation.

It takes her a while. She doesn't always remember to recast the light for him right away whenever it goes out.

When she is done, the light happens to be on, and the scroll dramatically shrivels up into scraps. She sweeps them all into her hand and drops them into the chamber pot. Then she does more book-related things, sometimes touching invisible or possibly imaginary shapes in the air.

He keeps dozing off here and there, jerking awake when his head falls too far to one side or when the light comes back on.  The scroll shriveling definitely feels like it wakes him up, but the effect doesn't last very long and he's nodding off again within a minute or two even though he'd sort of like to watch her work the air.

She walks up to him, gestures that he should ideally look alive, and casts another spell, with noseboop.

"There. Sorry, I didn't have this one and needed to go out and buy it."

- Oh!!

"You can buy superpowers?"

"You can buy individual spells that you can cast once, and if you are a wizard you can copy them over so that you can prepare them every day. It wouldn't do anything for you. What are your most urgent questions, it's understandable if they're 'can I sleep now' but I do have things to do first thing upon waking so before I go to sleep myself you need to be squared away for the duration."

"No, I'm awake."  He stands up. "...What's going on here?  With, uh, the whole situation."

"I have. Bad news. About that."

"Oh."

"Yeah, drow in general suck and the only reason for a member of another species to be down here is if they're a slave, I have told my family I won you in a bet."

"...Oh."

"I can start putting out feelers for getting you upstairs but if you're from a whole other planet I don't even know how much better that'd be."

"I'm pretty sure about being from a whole other planet."

"I am nowhere near powerful enough to get you to another planet, or even get as far as somebody who'd be able to, let alone afford their services."

"Okay."  What if he sits back down, actually.

"If you like where you're going I could kill you? Some people think suicide is evil and it wouldn't be the stupidest decision Pharasma's ever made."

"What?"

"...I'm not sure which part of that you want clarification on."

"I - who's Pharasma?"

"The creator? I guess I don't know how well this spell handles proper nouns if you have a different name for her."

"I haven't really thought about dying."  He swallows.  "Um, as an option."

"Well, you don't have to decide now, but I can only keep you moderately safe for an indefinite period of time, not completely safe for a definite and long period of time. You've got to eat five times what a halfling does and I don't have that many heavy things to carry, the cover will pretty much only hold while people assume I'm using you for sex and then I'm going to get strongly worded hints about responsible budgeting."

"Uh, I - uh.

Okay."

"I wish I had better news for you. Do you have a notion where you're going?"

"You mean when I die?"

"Yeah. Drow all get the Abyss no matter if we're lovely people or not for historical reasons but you're not a drow."

"'The Abyss' as in, what, hell or something?"

"No, Hell's for Lawful Evil, we're Chaotic Evil."

"What religion is this?  Sorry."

"Around here people mostly go in for Nocticula but you get shrines to Abraxas, Zura, Shax, farmers like Cyth-V'sug. Socothbenoth's controversial. - Drow prefer demon lords to full-fledged gods, they're more relatable, I do also know the names of some regular gods if that would help you triangulate at all. Do they have totally different gods on Earth?"

"...You said this might do names wrong, but I think so.  Um, I don't know that much about religions with lots of gods.  And I don't know of any with the lawful chaotic thing."

"Huh. Good and evil translate okay? I think Golarion is particularly contentious because it's got the Destroyer trapped in it, maybe on Earth all the Good gods got away with a coalition faith and elide the law/chaos axis, that's the sort of thing that's probably happening somewhere..."

"Maybe.  They all translate fine, I just hadn't heard of two of them being related to this."

"Nine alignments, nine afterlives. - nine main afterlives and probably some oddball demiplane situations. Chaotic evil, the Abyss, neutral evil Abaddon, lawful evil Hell; chaotic neutral the Maelstrom; double neutral the Boneyard; lawful neutral Axis; chaotic good Elysium; neutral good Nirvana; lawful good Heaven."

"I definitely don't know which of those I could go to, if it's any of them."

"Well, then I guess you should stay alive and try to rack up good deeds, only I don't know there's much scope for you to do those down here."

"Okay.  I - can try and be worth it to feed.  I like cleaning; I can, um, pay bills or whatever..."

"What, do you have a bunch of gold in your bag along with the surface food?"

"No, sorry, I just meant the, um, chore of it.  Maybe you don't do things like that here."  The cash he was bringing to Forks is in his other bag, and it's probably useless here anyway.  Better for his parents to have it.

"The... chore of paying for things? Do you mean, like, shopping?"

"That too.  I think you probably don't have the thing I meant here."

"Cleaning I mostly do myself since I have magic, but the halflings take care of the nightsoil pot - I don't know about upstairs but down here it's valuable, farmers buy it - shopping you'd get ripped off. I may wind up needing to lend you to my mom at least often enough to keep up appearances. She's not bad as they go and she's got a spell that's good for hauling work, she could have you loading and unloading."

"Sure.  I mean, I'm not actually strong, at all, but I can try it."

"...how not-strong are we talking about. Like, if you wanted to, could you pick me up and put me down someplace a few feet away."

"I, uh, well, could try that too?"  He shifts on his bag, unsure of whether to stand up.

"I'm not telling you to do it, I just want to know if you're too weak to pull it off if you were trying."

"I don't know."

"...okay, well, the major advantage of a human over a halfling is size and if you're not using it I'm really going to have to sell the 'using you for sex' angle, so be prepared for my sister to be completely insufferable for all eternity, but I guess it's what we have to work with and my mom's spendy enough she won't rein me in very soon."

"Do you have something that isn't you for me to try lifting."  His face is entirely red.

"Again, I don't need anything lifted right here right now, I just need a ballpark on how much you can pick up to know if you'd earn your keep putting coal and ore on Rynaeri's floating disk."

"I don't know the ballpark without lifting anything.  I didn't do a lot of it back home."

She sighs. She picks up the duffel bag to assess its weight and then starts looking through its contents.

Yeah he can budge over.

It's mostly clothes!  A pair of sneakers, a travel CD player, a handful of CDs, four books one of which is hardcover.

"The good news is that a lot of these things have amazing resale value, we can coast on that for a while if I find the right fence. What's this?" she says of the CD player.

"It plays music."  He unwinds the headphones, then takes the case on top of the pile and pops in its contents.  There's a little view window which shows the disc inside start spinning.  "Put these on your head.  Over your ears."

She places the headphones over i.e. above her ears.

"No, uh -" He cups his hands demonstratively on his own head.  But even incorrectly positioned she can hear something coming from the padded circles.

She moves them to the correct place. Smiles.

"Is it hard to learn to use?"

"I don't think so.  It won't last forever, though.  I just put in fresh batteries but they'll run out in a few months."

"What's a battery?"

"It's something that stores power for stuff like this to run on.  I don't have any spares or anything else to take them out of."

"And... no magic where you're from so you have no idea if Mending fixes them?"

"Uh, no."

"Okay. So a few months and then it might never work again. And these?" She taps the other CDs.

"They have different music on them.  Er, very different music; this one was a gift from my stepdad."  He presses stop on the player and powers it down.

"- so the music comes from the disk, but only if it spins? What if there were another way to spin one?"

"Maybe...  I think it has to do with a laser bouncing off of it, or something.  Maybe magic could do it; you can already do light, which, uh, is what a laser is."

"I... don't immediately know how to do that and to invent a spell for it I'd have to know a lot more about how this works, do you know more about it than you're saying?"

"Uh, I think it has a lot of tiny grooves on it, tiny enough that if you scratch the shiny side of the CD that can ruin it, and the player shines a light so that when the grooves spin past they bounce it and... makes music.  Somehow."  He swallows.  "That's all I know."

...she gingerly takes out a spare disk and shines the current glowing object at it.

It's very shiny!  It glints rainbowly and throws an unshadow on the cave wall.

"Well, it's really pretty, I guess if I can't work out a way to make it work as music it might sell as a decoration for somebody who keeps their place lit up."

"I had a friend who did that.  I could probably make them into a hanging thing that's cooler than they are by themselves.  If doing magic on the batteries doesn't work."

"...I can't tell if you are trying to be financially valuable or if you're just bored out of your skull."

"First one."

"The objects are valuable and you brought them; if you merely don't fuss about my selling them and explain them to me, that will do, I suspect I know the state of local commerce better than you."

He nods.

Anything else cool in here besides clothes?

Well, they're very strange clothes!  A fair number of them have words or images on them, and nearly all of them feel odd.

"What are these made of?"

"They say on the tags - cotton and polyester, mostly, I think?  You probably don't have polyester and I don't really know what it is."

"Does it take tailoring much differently from other fabrics?"

"Probably not."

"Let me get measurements for you so I can get you something less exotic and attention-getting to wear than what you have on." She finds a string and motions for him to stand up. "What's the bag made of?"

He rises.  "Um, I think also polyester."

She measures him, making little knots in the string as she goes to mark his height and shoulders and waist circumference and so on. "Okay. I have school for the next week but I'm on a break after that and will be able to start looking around the marketplace for buyers. I need sleep and you look half asleep already, anything else to cover before we do that? I don't have another hammock so you'll have to be on the floor, unfortunately."

He's remarkably tall, and unremarkable otherwise.

"....Can I try picking you up."

"...I guess, sure."

This is probably the most embarrassing thing he's ever done.  But he really wants to know what his life is going to look like, about this.

So he bends his knees, wraps his arms around her waist, stands up, takes a few steps, and sets her back down.  And retreats.

"Cool, I'll tell Rynaeri that you can probably be of use if she needs an extra pair of hands."

Nod nod nod.

"Anything else?"

"No."

"Okay. Good luck getting comfortable." She removes an outer layer and climbs into her hammock. The light expires soon after.

"Thanks."

He piles his clothes back into the duffel and tries sitting on it again.  The conversation woke him back up a fair bit so he doesn't immediately resume nodding off, but eventually he does.  It's still fitful; he spends what feels like a very long time drifting half-awake, unable to really sleep, but at some point he's done that for long enough that being properly horizontal sounds really appealing, and once he makes the switch he can mostly stay something like asleep for some amount of time.

A halfling comes by in the morning to wake Belmarniss up in time for school, with breakfast (fried mushrooms on top of toasted mushroom planks that are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike toast). There's some for Beau too.

When the halfling leaves, Belmarniss asks around a mouthful of breakfast, "Do you think you'll be all right sitting here till I get back, maybe working on writing yourself notes on the language that you can study with the spell removed later so that eventually we can sometimes get by without my casting it every day?"

Nomf.  Okay, this isn't terrible, even if it's going to get old fast.  "- Yeah, I think so."

"If anyone comes in, tell them you're mine and that I'm giving you a couple of days to recover before I put you to work, that mantlehood* did you some harm. If my sister comes in specifically probably just ignore everything she says."

*Technically a "darkhood", itself a variant of a "darkmantle". But these characters are speaking Drow and everything down here is dark unless otherwise specified.

"Okay."  Chew chew.  "What should I use to write?"

"Slate and chalk, you can use it while I'm in school. Chalk's cheap, there's a big deposit in the southdowns."

"Oh."  So copying long passages from his books is out.  "Okay.  Can I, um, be in your hammock?  While you're not using it?"

"Yeah, sure. Might make sense to be on an opposed sleep schedule in the long run, I can make out that you're standing guard for me and we won't need two hammocks."

"Okay."  It's not like it's even inconvenient; it's already dark down here all the time.  "...Do you think I can visit somewhere with sunlight sometimes?  Even if I can't live there?"

"We're a ways down. Trekking up isn't impossible but it'd be a significant trip, not something you can do to pop out for a minute. I'll take you up and leave you there if that's what you want? But surfacers might just kill me on sight and they wouldn't be being idiots to do it so I'd rather not stay long."

"What are we under?"

"Country called Taldor. I speak the language, though I've probably got a wretched accent, if you want to learn it."

"What, uh, geographical features..."

"I've never been there, mind." She goes to her atlas and opens it up. "Big river, mountains here and here, forest straddling this border, capital's here where the river meets the sea."

Well, it's no desert, but it sounds like it might be better than Forks.  "Is there anything useful up there?  Maybe I could go shopping, if people won't want to kill me on sight.  Or selling."

"People won't kill you for being a human. I absolutely cannot rule out that they would kill you for looking foreign, carrying money, being on speaking terms with drow, not worshiping whoever the local favorite god is, etcetera."

"Sorry. I wish I had better news."

What does he say.  "...Thanks."

"Anything else to cover before I prep spells and go?"

He shakes his head.

"Mkay." She swallows the rest of her breakfast and consults her spellbook.

He's pretty curious what's in it; can he see from here?  Does it seem like she might not want him to look?

She definitely notices him looking, but then shrugs and doesn't say anything about it. It's covered in something that looks sort of like diagrams of clockwork as imagined by sapient spaghetti. It's in black and white, but notated with finely etched textures in various sections to serve a similar purpose.

He doesn't actually think that he's going to be able to get superpowers just by looking at it, but it's not like he has anything better to do at the moment.

She traces bits of it with her fingers in careful ritualized patterns and makes similar motions in the air above the pages she studies. He can't read it, though he can read the spines of the other books on her shelf (well, some of them) if he tries, while the light holds.

Since he's awake enough to watch her hands this time he'll mostly do that.

It's like she's manipulating an invisible object of an unpredictable-to-him rigidity and tendency to deform on its own.

She's done with her morning prep in about half an hour and collects her stuff to go to school. "Last minute anything?"

"Um, can you maybe start the light over?"

"Yes, but it won't last. I'll start asking around for permanent torches, and if you get really freaked out about it you can go sit in the kitchen with the halflings, they've got the cookfire to see by."

"Thank you."

"Wish I could do better." And she takes the cloak off the hooks and sweeps off into the tunnels.

He gets to trying to write down useful words while the light lasts.  Numbers, 'thank you', 'sorry', 'help', 'yes' and 'no', 'I don't know', 'hello', 'I'm Belmarniss's', 'she told me to stay here'.  'Please'.  'I'm hungry / thirsty / tired.'  And all their English translations.

He's most of the way through trying to selectively erase things and rewrite them as small as he can manage when the light goes out.  He shuffles over to the hammock and tries sculpting the air to see if he feels anything.  What if he imagines wiggly gears and stuff while he does it.

This accomplishes literally nothing at all.

Well, he wouldn't necessarily feel if it did, and also it's not like he has any better entertainment options.  It's better than sitting here and letting his thoughts get dark.  Though - this is much more endurable, than last time.  He's had the context explained to him, even if it's really bad, and he's learned that the context can be explained to him.  He can sit in the hammock.  He has an approximate sense of when Belmarniss is going to come back, that isn't 'maybe never'.

He's tired, but not in a way where he's really ready to try sleeping again, which isn't the worst mindset to do things that accomplish literally nothing at all in.  He can pass at least an hour or two on this, easy.

They don't appear to do lunch down here. That or the halflings forgot he was there.

He's not going to ask for food until he has a better understanding of exactly how expensive it is, and maybe not even then.  ....However, he does need to figure out how to use the chamber pot (without even a cloak on the doorway, ack, and also without a place to wash his hands afterward, ack) and then go in search of water.  While kind of awkwardly hovering his hands away from everything.

Well, it's pitch dark in the room, but if he kicks around to find his way to the aperture he can juuuust barely see the reflected firelight from the kitchen cave down the hall.

Yep, that's where he's headed.  Reeeeally slowly.  (He's actually capable of doing this without falling over or bumping into anything too hard, as long as he takes it at molasses pace.)

Yeah, it's no longer obvious where his feet are at all. At least there's no real reason to hurry.

In the kitchen there are a couple of halflings, murmuring to each other while one sweeps the floor and the other - pickles? some fish and mushrooms into glass jars. They look up when he comes in.

"Hi."

"Hi," giggles the one with the broom.

Oh no.  "I'm Beau.  It's," it's not nice to meet them; it's so aggressively not-nice-to-meet-them that he might look like an idiot if he says that it is, "uh, hi, who are you?  - I mean, what are your names."  He is immediately going to forget their names after this.

"Yin." (The one with the broom.)

"Via."

"Hi," he repeats inanely.  "Um, is there a way for me to get water, here?  For hand-washing."  He's also pretty darn thirsty, but maybe if he asks about them separately, then they'll end up being separate.  A guy can hope.

"No, there are rags to wipe off your hands and then when the sorcerers are here they clean it. Water is only to drink and cook," says Yin. "It has to be carried all the way from the river or the temple."

"Okay.  Thank you.  Where are the rags?"

Yin points. They're hanging from a hook carved into the wall.

Wipe wipe wipe wipe.  Is there an obvious dirty pile.  (He shouldn't volunteer to haul extra water; it's bad enough how desperate to be useful he must seem to Belmarniss, and it seems like it might be dangerous instead of just embarrassing for other people to get that read off him.)

There's a sort of hamper-nook carved into the wall. Yin hags up another rag when he's done from a fresh pile in a cupboard-nook.

Hamper nook!  "Where's the drinking water?"

Via points at a sink full of water with a ladle dipper in it.

...Yeah, he's really thirsty.  Gulp gulp.  Trying not to touch the ladle.

It has a mineral-y taste but is basically fine to drink.

Okay.  He thanks the halflings and heads back to Belmarniss's room.  ...Or tries to, given that there's no light in that one.

Hopefully he finds it! And isn't sitting in some random family member of hers's bedroom!

Are the hammock and the books where he remembers them to be?

With enough feeling around: yes, congratulations!

He'll go back to relaxing in the hammock and quarter-heartedly trying to do magic again.  This time focusing on trying to do the light thing specifically.

When that doesn't work he passes a while trying to brute force some vocabulary associations without the use of text.  Eventually he comes up with a little bilingual rhyme which he's pretty sure he'll be able to remember tomorrow unless the forgetting happens magically.

After she's been gone for nearly eight hours, Belmarniss reappears and lights up a convenient rock for him. "All good?"

He's aimlessly sculpting the air when she walks in.  He might have somewhat forgotten that just because he can't see his hands doesn't mean she and her family can't.

"Yep."

"...what are you doing?"

"... It was dark and I was.  Bored."

"That's legit, I was trying to like, give you time to settle in before I put you to work but I can send you with the halflings hauling water tomorrow and pitch my mom on borrowing you the next day, since I got you some normal clothes to change into." She tosses him a bundle. Hangs up her cloak again. "I'll step out while you figure that out, shall I?"

"Thanks!"  Can he make sense of these clothes.

It's a long gray hooded robe with a belt - more belts? - a belt and some other kind of cinch he's meant to do something with? - and a mysterious rectangle.

Okay, the robe is pretty straightforward; for the rest, what about this configuration - hm, that's not right, and neither is this - this one doesn't feel that off?  "Decent!" he calls, once he thinks he is.

In she comes. "- the cinches are for your sleeves, so they don't dangle or catch on things."

"Oh."  Uncinch uncinch recinch recinch.

"I've decided to wait a while before trying to sell your stuff; I don't want it to look like it had anything to do with you or like you might be, uh, interesting."

"Thank you."  Sleeve fidget.  "I didn't mind being bored," he tries.  "I mean, uh, I want to be helpful, and it would be really good if there was more water here - do you guys know about germs? - but, I mean, I could have stayed in the kitchen.  If I'd wanted."  (To stand around and be made fun of, for - well.)

"What's a germ?"

"They're really small things that live on everything, and some of them are fine but lots of them will make you sick.  But they come off with soap and water, so you can stop a lot of them from getting inside you if you wash your hands after touching certain things.  And then get sick less."

"Wizards do get sick less than regular people, but so do clerics and martial adventurers who can't cast Prestidigitation, so I don't think it can be like that here."

"...I would still feel a lot better if I could wash my hands sometimes.  Do you have soap?"

"I've seen it in fancy places but it's kind of a waste of perfectly edible lard."

"Okay."

"I can Prestidigitate things fine, is there something you want me to go over now?"

"That's the cleaning spell?"  He holds out his hands even though he's pretty doubtful now that it actually gets things on the germ level.

"Mmhm." She prestidigitates his hands.

Do they feel any different?

A little bit! It's a different sensation than "freshly soaped and dried off", since no water featured, but it feels like something.

Well, that's not nothing.  He wants to ask more about magic, now, but first - "How was your day?"

"It was fine - are you trying to just like, learn more about how my school is structured, or what?"

"It would be rude not to ask."

"Well, it was fine, nobody died."

"- Oh.  Okay."

"...to be clear people don't die on most days, I'm aware that 'nobody died' is a low bar."

"...How many people go to your school?"

"It varies, you usually buy one or two classes at a time and take months or years off between depending on finances. Also the school itself isn't very clearly all one thing... Couple hundred people?"

He nods.  "There were seven hundred people in my year back home.  And the schools I've gone to have had a few people die over the years.  ...But not at the schools, I don't think."

"Most people smart enough to spend much time in school, down here, are learning to be wizards, and wizards get stronger in fights, so we have duels sometimes, and generally the healer standing by will cover it if someone overshoots accidentally - or intentionally - but there's always the possibility of mishap."

"Huh.  ...Is there a way to tell whether I'm one of the humans who can get magic?"

"Well, if you haven't noticed sorcery yet you probably don't have it, and I'm not getting an Abyssal cleric vibe off you at all, but do you know approximately how smart you are, like, in a room of ten people would you be smarter than most of them? In like, a math and memorization way."

"I might be?"

"That's a really unhelpful answer."

"...I was in some advanced classes at school.  But I don't know - what the other nine people are like, here..."

"Completely random people."

"You're the only person I've really talked to here, so I don't..."  Hrm.  "I mean, if most people here don't go to school I probably... have more practice."

"I don't mean people here! If I didn't know humans could be wizards I'd tell you it was a waste of time! If you picked ten random people from where you're from, about your age if you're getting distracted thinking about toddlers, how many of them would be dumber than you?"

"Um, six or seven?"  Why does she keep making him guess how good he is at things instead of just letting him try whatever it is.  He instantly regrets picking those numbers and wants to backtrack for different ones, but not as much as he wants this part of the conversation to be over.  So six and seven it is.

"Then you can probably be a wizard, at least a little. You might be able to prepare spells out of my spellbook, which is good because ink is pricey. It will be... odd... for someone occupying the social position of a slave to be able to cast spells but if you really want to I think it would be a tolerable amount of odd. It will probably take you months and might easily take you years before you can even sometimes hang a spell and get it to go off, especially considering that I cannot leave my spellbook here with you while I'm off doing stuff."

Nod nod nod nod.

"Is it Prestidigitation you want to start with or Light?"

"Will they both take about the same amount of time or will I get faster?"

"Light is simpler. This means you might get it slightly faster but it is worse practice for other spells. The two of them sequentially will probably take about the same amount of time whichever you do first."

"If I'm already going to be bothering you for both of them on the regular... things stay clean but the light runs out.  ...Unless you get a permanent one."

"We actually used to have a Continual Flame but sold it once Sovi was old enough that she didn't need a nursemaid any more. They're around. But you need a fair amount of ground up ruby to cast one. I'll start you on Light and see how quick you seem with it."

She gets out her spellbook. A halfling comes in with stew for the both of them. Mushrooms and bacon this time.

It's nice that there's meat sometimes.  "Thank you," he tells the halfling.  ...Probably he shouldn't go very near the spellbook while he has food, but he can shovel it down pretty quickly.

Indeed, omnomnom.

She sits on the floor when she's done eating; she only has the one bone chair. Flips to the page on Light.

"Light is a cantrip, that is a 'zeroth'-circle spell. That means that its shape does not have any complete perforations. Fundamentally, it is a blob - a blob that has been poked and pulled and pinched but never punctured. If it had one puncture, it would be first-circle; two, second-circle; and so on."

"Okay.  Like a 2-D blob or a 3-D one or neither?"

"3-D, or it'd be a lot easier to draw. Everybody draws it differently; you're going to learn my notation to save on ink but if you wind up seriously pursuing wizardry you'll come up with your own idiosyncrasies. Now, if you got to build this thing out of clay, that would be pretty easy - you'd probably start here, it's flat enough to set on a work counter, you'd poke in that divot and then you'd start smoothing the rest of it into all this nonsense over here. But you do not get to build this thing out of clay, you have to build it out of magic, and in order for it to stabilize - do the thing that wizard spells do so they sit waiting patiently to be cast, instead of the thing sorcerer spells do where you pull them out of your ass on no notice - you have to do it in a way that respects its internal dependencies. In the case of Light, that means you have to do these three parts simultaneously, first, and then they'll hold tension on each other while you tie this knot and stretch out this wiggly bit. Take a wild guess what you do next."

"Um... hold the wiggly bit and press this twist in to meet it?"

"That's what you'd think, yep! But since you've got the first three bits all in place already and not this one, doing that actually pulls too hard over here, you'll rupture it. So first you have to invert this here stemmed-glass-shaped business, everything beyond the crosshatching, this bit is the reverse view of that step - and then tuck the wiggly bit in there, wrapped around the stem of the resulting mushroomy thing and squeezed in very gently under the cap. That holds it still while you pinch the base of the twist, invert these nubbins all the way on the other side to add slack to the main bulk of the structure so that you can then freely move the twist without wrecking anything, and then, yes, you bring the twist over to the mushroomy thing too. We're now at this step over here. With me so far?"

"Um..."  He stares at the spellbook for a good twenty seconds, his eyes flitting between the diagrams.  "I guess I'm confused about how inverting works?  Like, why does it make sense to do that instead of just forming it the right way in the first place?"

"That's a detour from the most direct path to actually casting it, do you want to bone up on theory and accept some delay or nah?"

"Umm, I'm interested but I think I want to get to the part where I try and cast something, in case humans in my world are different from the ones here and I just can't interact with magic at all.  From the doing-it side."

"Right. So, next step, you press here - getting the hang of exactly where was for me the biggest sticking point when I was first learning and had trouble with cantrips - and you push this way, careful not to touch this part nor to puncture the structure over here in this tight spot, and you get it nested with this protrusion. That sets you up for braiding these long parts together. You can practice the braid with string to help visualize the pattern but you cannot become attached to any - somatic mnemonics, because you are going to be braiding magic with your mind, not your hands."

"And you're doing something else with your hands at the same time?"

"Yeah. The ink is magic and you draw that out while you perform the transformations. It's the same stuff they use for magic items but much less of it; you provide most of the power for the spell from your self, not the spellsilver."