The forest is still beautiful. Leaf litter crunches underfoot, and rainbow starlight filters through the leaves. She isn't sure exactly how far away the brass place is from here. She isn't sure it matters. If she gets tired, she can go home to the Cozy Cave and sleep.

As it turns out, though, it does not take her a full day to walk to the spot where her internal compass says she can find that rust-red sand.

She only feels about a one-hour-walk amount of tired when her sense of its position goes from 'that way' to 'over there', and it's only a few minutes after that when 'over there' becomes 'very close', and she ducks into the shelter of a rocky overhang and her internal compass hums here, here. There's even a glint of metal poking out of the ground, and she thinks she can faintly hear the ticking of the great brass dome.

She closes her eyes, the better to concentrate, and focuses on the place where the clockwork sun feels closest. Her normal senses can't see it at all, but to her dream senses it's like a neon sign, This Way To The Brass Place.

Once again, it takes her a few minutes to make her way through to the other side.

...in its own way, the brass place is just as beautiful as the forest.

It is not, however, nearly so welcoming.

The starlit forest makes breathing feel like a comforting embrace. The Cozy Cave House overflows with an essence of just-for-her that makes her feel safer there than she ever felt in her life.

Under the brass dome, looking out across a field of silvery grass speckled with copper wildflowers, she feels a faint unease that refuses to ebb. It's like there's some deep resonance in the world that she's not quite aligned with, and the dissonance is buzzing in her bones.

Well. She's here now, and she's going to gather flowers.

"Dream instincts to the rescue once again," she mutters to herself, stepping carefully through the patchy grass. What metal is that? It's vaguely silver-coloured, but most metals are. Her dream instincts are no help at all with identifying the metals by names she knows, but what they do help with is knowing how to walk between them without hurting herself, and how to safely uproot a flower when she finds one she likes the look of. She can even take a handful of sand, if she's careful, though not much more than that if she cares about the rest of the flowers—but a handful of sand is enough to get started, in the Cozy Cave Garden.

She hunts through the flowers until she finds the prettiest one, a delicate golden blossom with its long round petals all gathered inward into a sort of skirt. Maybe she could make a dress that looks like that... no, focus. Ever so carefully, she digs in the sand to get the flower up into her cupped hands with a little sand still around it. The ends of its roots prickle against her fingers. She closes her eyes and focuses homeward.

The first thing she feels, when she finally makes it back to the Cozy Cave across the long twisting bridge between worlds, is deep relief.

The second is self-consciousness, naturally.

Very carefully, she carries her golden flower with its double handful of red sand straight through the sitting room and out to the garden, and with every careful step and every dribble of sand onto the floor she is thinking (and occasionally muttering aloud), "Should've brought a bucket! Why didn't I bring a bucket! I am a bucketless fool!"

But, bucketless fool or no, she gets the flower and nearly all of its sand safely ensconced in the middle of the sand garden. (It seems like the logical place.)

And then she gets up, and dusts off her hands, and checks the big sturdy cabinets that seem like they might be her garden's equivalent of a garden shed, and among many other useful garden-related items she does indeed find a plain wooden bucket.

"I feel very silly right now," she informs it.

The bucket has no response.

She was not really expecting it to.

Well. After that little adventure, she thinks she and her sheepishness would like to wander over to the library and see what there is to see.

Right, so, the good news: there are a lot of books.

The bad news: relatively few of them are in... alphabets... that she recognizes?

The somewhat perplexing yet very welcome news: she finds herself with a dream-memory of sitting at that desk puzzling out all kinds of languages she's never heard of before. If she's following what the dreams were trying to tell her, she has some kind of dream-instinct for languages now, and any book in her library will be one she can read... eventually.

Eventually isn't now, though, and right now she wants to be plonked in that armchair with a book written in English. She grabs the first one she sees.

For a few hours, there doesn't have to be such a thing as her, because instead of experiencing herself she is experiencing this story about a librarian escaping political turmoil to live on an island and grow raspberries.

She emerges slightly tired, slightly creaky, and thinking longingly of raspberry jam. Do her dreams have anything to say about magical jam powers, or the location of the nearest raspberry bush?

Money can be exchanged for goods and services.

Yes, yes. Besides that.

She gets up, stretches, puts the book away, and checks her pantry. Jamless. Sitting on a stool at the kitchen island, she tries to broaden her dream-search. There's got to be something...

A hint of a glimmer of a notion: if she went to the brass place, and deepened her connection with it, she could learn to safely eat the fruit there.

The brass place is so intimidating, though. And it feels like deepening her connection will take quite a long time. Probably after all that she will no longer have this very specific raspberry yearning. She doesn't even normally like raspberries. In fact, now that she thinks of it, strawberries sound nicer.

She ponders strawberries.

If she gathers up some of the good dirt from the forest, the stuff her dreams told her about, maybe she could grow strawberries in her garden. If she could find some somewhere. Earth has them but she's not keen to go back. The Planet of College Girls probably has them, but she doesn't have any money there. Well, at the moment she doesn't have any money on Earth either, and also it's a big planet and she doesn't know how the portals decide where to put you so there's really no guarantee that she'd land somewhere that would take her money if she did have any.

She thinks she might want to try, though.

Okay. She should get her bucket. She should go back to the brass place, and pick a few more flowers, and maybe walk a little farther and see if she can scrounge an acorn and some black sand to grow it in, because her dreams think she could learn to work metal as easily as winebark if she grows an iron tree, and that just sounds neat.

After that, she can go back to the forest, and take home a bucket of loam, and then... Planet of College Girls? Yes, she thinks so. It can't possibly be worse than college.

Step One: Bucket.

She's going to make this face every time she picks up her bucket from now on, isn't she.

Well, nothing for it. She focuses, and makes her slow effortful way across the bridge in her heart to land amid the shining flowers.

It isn't safe for the flowers to dig out much sand from around them, but she makes her way carefully through the field and takes a double handful with each flower she picks. A copper one with many delicate pointed petals; a silver one whose petals are ruffled like petticoats, with a pleasing three-way symmetry. She wishes she knew the names of more flowers. She'd recognize a rose if she saw one, but that's about where her flower knowledge begins and ends. Oh, and dandelions. She would probably recognize a dandelion. There don't seem to be any around here. Maybe she can find a book on plant identification?

Maybe she can do that later, once the Plan is complete.

For now, she fills her bucket with flowers nestled in sand—four of them in total, the two from before plus a variant of the copper one with shorter, less elegant petals and a different copper one with a big round face that almost makes her think of sunflowers—and navigates the bridge back home to plant them.

In her sand garden, the red sand is already starting to spread outward from where she left it, overtaking the pale stuff that came with the house.

This is an expected feature of the Cozy Cave but it's still nice to see it confirmed.

She nestles each flower carefully in its own double handful of sand, tips the rest of the sand out of the bucket so as not to waste any, then heads right back out to the brass place. All this hopping back and forth is getting a little tedious, but, she supposes, it's not like she has any urgent appointments.

It's a long walk through the field of flowers to get to the smudge on the horizon that looks like it might be a forest, but then it does in fact turn out to be a forest, every tree black on black like a leafy wrought-iron fence. She steps far enough inside to be sure of getting unmixed black sand, then starts scooping it into her bucket by the glittering handful, one every few steps as she keeps an eye out for acorns. The bucket is half full by the time she finds one, and it looks wrong for an acorn, weirdly out of proportion. Is it deformed? Unripe, or whatever the acorn equivalent is? Or does she just not know what acorns are supposed to look like?

She studies it more closely, trying to call on her dream knowledge, and when she stops fretting and lets herself breathe, her dream knowledge answers. Yes, this is the right type of acorn for this type of tree, and it's ready to grow. All she has to do is take it home and plant it.

Satisfied, she drops the acorn in her bucket of sand and closes her eyes and turns her thoughts homeward again.