Red sand is making a solid effort to take over the sand garden entirely.

She wonders if she should be trying to preserve that white sand. Maybe she'll dig out a little spot for it somewhere, just in case she wants some later.

For now, though, she needs to plant this tree. She grabs a shovel and some work gloves out of the garden tools and heads past the sand garden to the back wall, where she thought she saw a small enough bed of dirt that she might be able to dig it all out in a reasonable timeframe. And there it is! A circle of dirt bordered in stone and surrounded by water, a perfect place to plant her iron oak. (She is at least fairly confident of the correspondence between acorns and oaks.)

Shoveling dirt is hard work, but no harder than she expected, really. She clears out the spot, piling the dirt onto neighbouring beds. Maybe the black sand would just take over the dirt like the red sand is taking over the white sand, but she doesn't want to leave that up to chance, and the dirt is so wet by comparison - what if the acorn rusts? She is informed that rust is bad for acorns. So, no dirt.

One grubby and effortful hour later, or thereabouts, she contends with the bucket once more to get the sand piled up in the middle of the empty bed and the acorn planted in the pile. So far, so good.

Part of her wants to immediately go take another shower, but the next step of the plan involves visiting the starlit forest and coming back with as much dirt as she can carry, so she might as well leave showering for after that.

She considers taking the bucket along, but she doesn't really think one bucketful of dirt will be enough. She wants to take over her garden with it, perhaps leaving one or two beds alone just to study the contrast and in case she someday meets a plant delicate enough to turn up its nose at magic dirt. She might end up asking another tree for its bark, even though asking trees for their bark makes her feel incredibly awkward, and making a sort of sack and carrying dirt with that. She should, however, bring her shovel, to fill the sack faster. And her gloves, to better hold the shovel.

Thusly equipped, she sets off.

In the brass place, she follows her internal compass back to the world-bridge, and at the bridge she makes her slow laborious way through to the forest, and in the forest she walks for a few minutes to get away from the rocky overhang and deeper into the trees where the dirt is friendlier. She's not sure how she's detecting the friendliness of the dirt. There's just something about it. Dream instincts, probably.

Anyway, it's time for May I Please Have Your Skin, the worst part of this whole expedition.

"Um," she says, awkwardly, to the nearest tree. "May I please have some bark? I need to make a bag to carry dirt in."

The nearest tree is glad to provide!

She feels so complicated about this!

But, after sitting down and folding the sheet of bark in half and closing up the edges with polite, nervous coaxing, she has a sack. A reasonably sized, reasonably sturdy sack. She proceeds to shovel dirt into it.

The sack, when full, is heavy enough that she has some trouble lifting it. She would've had even more trouble, before her dream-powers. She's not sure how she feels about that. She still thinks of herself as a small, delicate, largely useless creature, but here she is hefting a bag of dirt that weighs more than she does and not feeling more than a moderate strain.

Rather than dwell on the personal and philosophical implications of that, she focuses her way through the inward bridge to the Cozy Cave, and takes her bag of dirt out to the garden to distribute a thin layer of it across most of the empty soil beds. It covers, all told, about half the room. The loam of the starlit forest is a rich coffee-black colour that makes the ordinary dirt look pale and sickly by comparison.

She does smile, a little, looking out across her garden and thinking about the things she could plant there. Perhaps one day she will have strawberries.

For now, she has a shower.

As friendly as the forest's dirt is, there is an undeniable allure to not having any on you.

And then—

At this point in her plan, she was supposed to go to the Planet of College Girls. But her bathroom has a mirror, and when she looks at herself in it, she looks like a wardrobe malfunction waiting to happen.

This dress is very nice, and she is grateful to the tree that provided the bark for it, but she can't face the prospect of speaking to another human-adjacent being while wearing it.

It admittedly does hold up very well to light garden work, but the problem isn't just that she's afraid of it falling off, it's that she's afraid of other people looking at her and expecting it to fall off, and in that department it has some issues.

So. Now she has to decide whether to gather all her social courage and go to the College Planet anyway, or whether she would rather go back to the forest and get more bark and take it home and put more time and effort into making a better dress.

It really is awkward, asking trees for their skin. She'd rather do as little of it as she can get away with.

But—they don't seem to think it's awkward. That's been pretty consistent so far. And they heal up very quickly afterward, without any apparent discomfort.

If they seemed upset or unhappy or harmed, that would be one thing. But as far as she can tell, they're fine. The misgivings are coming from inside the house.

So... yes, she thinks she'll try again on the dress.

She's going to be smart about it, though.

She heads into the library, and starts patiently scanning the shelves. If she's making an entire second dress with real time and real effort before she visits the Planet of College Girls, then she's not in any rush and she can afford to do some indexing first. Which books are in English, and do any of them cover relevant topics?

Perhaps she'll be interested in this illustrated botanical guide. It's in French.

That is not at all relevant to the current project... but she has enough high school French to puzzle through it even without magical dream powers, and she wants to know some names for her flowers even if they're French names. She puts it on her desk for later and continues methodically searching the shelves.

No handy sewing books with ready-to-go dress patterns, but she might be interested in this leatherworking manual.

You know what, given the observed properties of the bark, she'll take it. Though she doubts she has any of the relevant tools. She would not have predicted ahead of time that her house would need a crafting workshop but she finds herself really wishing for her house to manifest a crafting workshop.

...actually, wait... come to think of it, she does have the sense that this place is going to grow over time. A crafting workshop might just be in the cards, if it grows in a convenient enough fashion.

Standing amid the shelves, holding the leatherworking manual, she gazes into the middle distance and wonders if she should wait for the crafting workshop before she makes her second dress. Surely that would be reasonable, right? It could have real stitched seams if she did that. She'd waste less material on being bad at things if she could have all the right tools from the start.

...but she doesn't know how long it will take, or even if it will happen at all. Her Cozy Cave House has been very kind to her on a number of levels so far, but the wardrobe is completely empty; who's to say her crafting workshop wouldn't just be a big room with some tables in it? She has kitchen tools and gardening tools, but no clothing, and she hasn't spotted a hairbrush yet. The things this place provides to her are inconsistent at best.

She can gather more information about this. She leaves the leatherworking manual on the desk and goes to check if any of the bedroom furniture contains hairbrushes.

There's one in a drawer in the vanity.

Promising, but not conclusive.

Well.

...she thinks she will go get some bark anyway, and try making a dress, even though she will be able to make a better dress later. Really, whether or not she has the proper tools for the job, the second dress she ever makes is still going to be worse than the third. Such is the unavoidable nature of being a person learning a skill. And—hmm—