The sky is low and dark, a deep twilight blue lightening to green around a dim and distant sun. All around her, the ruins of some ancient city stand empty and crooked and silent, vast stone blocks cracked and crumbled, iron spires gone to rust and tipping over gently like drunk old men. Here and there among the ruin, a faint light shines; and the light reflects from that low sky in rippling gleams like moonlight on water. In places, the ruins are tall enough to cast shadows on the sky.

A whale swims by overhead, blocking out the sun.

Oh.

If this place isn't dangerous enough to abandon entirely, she thinks she'll want to come back just to look at it. The abandoned sunset doesn't seem like a loss, now. Even ruined as it is, it's very pretty. She twitches a finger to pull at a thread of starlight in her mind to bookmark this location for later. Is that an ocean overhead? But she's certainly breathing air, she would have noticed if she'd missed and started breathing water. Not that breathing water would hurt her, but she'd definitely notice the difference in composition.

She looks around with a small smile, and carefully begins investigating.

The architectural style is distinctly foreign. A lot of curves and circles - low-rise apartment buildings arcing in tiers like blocky crowns around central courtyards, stone-scaled streets snaking between sweeping lines of buildings whose profiles arch and leap and dive like curling waves. It would be magnificent if it wasn't half rubble. It's still a little magnificent even so.

One building in particular seems to lie at the center of the pattern, and it's by far the most intact thing in sight, the stone only slightly falling apart, hardly any of its metal skeleton exposed. It even has a handful of unbroken windows, glass glittering in the light that glows from the streets - and it is literally the streets: the stone itself gives off a faint white light, in patches that look attributable to the slow scattered failure of a spell that once covered every tile.

Interesting. She might have to take the time to figure out how to copy the street light phenomenon. It's - neat. Pretty.

But first she thinks she wants to see why that building in particular is so intact. Is there anything interesting inside?

The outer door leads to an entrance hall, its walls decorated with looping arcs of luminous stone. She could turn off it onto a side corridor, or continue forward along what is clearly the main path.

Main path! Side paths are for when she's figured out what this place's deal is.

The door at the far end of the entrance hall leads to...

A cavernous space, ringed with crumbling arches, blue-grey stone swirling with thin lines of faint white light.

In the center of the room sits a chipped marble throne, rising from the floor in fluid lines like a frozen splash of silver water; and in the throne sprawls a man, tall and dark and wreathed in shadows, his eyes glowing with a light as green as the sea. The edges of his tattered black cloak shift like shadows and curl like mist. He props his head on one hand and stares at her with a hard-to-read expression.

... Huh. Is he like her...? It's sort of hard to tell. Especially since she hasn't met anything like her before, and she has no reason to think they'd be structurally similar.

Whatever he is, he's human shaped, which is about the most promising progress she's had in years. And he's on a throne. She doesn't have a ton of practice at curtsying, but somewhere along the way she picked up the ability to move with something resembling grace. She steps forward into one of the more well lit portions of the cavernous hall, and curtsies politely.

Her clothes are loose approximations of what she would have worn on Earth. The dark jeans and violet blouse are almost ordinary, though both are softer and sturdier. Her jacket is less ordinary - it looks like intricate dark lace set on a darker, light-eating black. Subtle flecks of stars sit fixed in the inky sky, fixed in place even when she moves, like moving an aperture looking into something instead of the something itself. There's something off about the rest of her, too, something a bit too perfect. It's a little uncanny. Like someone sat down to make a person and then succeeded too well, made something too pretty and perfect. In the dark, the irises of her eyes have a faint golden-white shine to them. Her hair is a touch too red, it catches the light better than it should.

He frowns in puzzlement and asks her something in a language she has predictably never heard before.

Yep, that was pretty predictable.

"I'm sorry, I don't understand you. I might be able to rig up something that'll let me speak your language if I work at it, though."

He looks at her consideringly.

"Can you -" she points at him, then at her mouth, "talk? It will help me with aiming." She makes a little 'go on' motion with her hand, to express that she would like for him to talk, and keep talking.

...apparently he can't, or at least doesn't want to, because he just looks at her some more.

She sighs. Okay, well, she has a perfect memory, and he said something earlier. That's probably enough to work with.

While she doesn't need to sit anymore, it'll probably be communicative if she does. So she does. She sits, cross legged, closes her eyes, consults her memory, and starts fiddling with her magic. To outside viewers, it looks like she's just sitting there with her eyes closed. To her, it's - well. There isn't really a metaphor. Like sewing with starlight, or conducting the movement of dust to make a symphony, following the hint of a melody that she only heard once but that is written down somewhere...

(She might notice after a while that the stone of the floor shifts ever so slightly, rising and falling by a fraction of a millimeter, in time with the shadowed man's breathing.)

She's actually barely paying attention to her body. Maybe she'll notice it later if she reviews the sensations it felt.

After a while of work, she opens her eyes and looks up at him.

"̶̝̩̦T͖̭͉͞ͅh҉̱e̘r̨̞͙e̼̲̱̣̣̟͟,͍̯̪̮̠̻ ̧͍̞n͖͖̫̦͓o̥̪̺̜̲͠w ̙͔͇̬̰̙͞ͅ-̲̪" she begins, in his language, almost intelligibly. Then she stops and huffs, annoyed. "̲̀ͅṈ̷̤o͚͚̯̠̺̤̻͡.̵̪̤"̖͖̱

She makes a face, briefly wrestles with proverbial starlight some more, then tries again: "There. Now do I sound a bit less, uh. Creepy and unnerving?"

"Where did you come from?"

"Another - um, dimension. I'm from a place called Earth. I got forcibly relocated, and now I'm trying to get back. Have been for a while. Hello."

He stares at her some more.

She shifts in her position on the floor, a little uncomfortable. Is she doing something wrong...?

"Sorry for appearing unannounced in your city, by the way. I - assume it's your city?"

"Not much of a city," he says. "But it is mine."

"It's -" she fidgets awkwardly on the floor, looking at her lap. "... I like it, it's a nice city. Even if it's - it's - maybe in need of some serious spackle and major structural - I'm sorry, I don't mean to - you are literally the first human shaped person I have seen in years, I am really tragically under socialized so I sincerely apologize if I'm -" She waves a hand awkwardly. "Too much this. I don't - if I'm bothering you I can go -"

"There hasn't been anyone else here for hundreds of years," he says. "Sometimes someone stumbles in through one of the old portals, but they mostly have the sense to run right back out again."

"Oh," she says. "Then I - absolutely don't have to go." She smiles, tentatively, at him. "I'm Yvette, what's your name?"