She must be strong. She must pursue her goals even when pursuing them is scary. She must go to the Planet of College Girls and look for strawberries there. Even though she will probably have social interactions with strangers and the strangers probably won't speak English and it will be horribly embarrassing and the chances she will find strawberries are overall pretty low. Even so.

Resolutely, she focuses her way to the forest.

...the forest is such a breath of fresh air. Which is weird, because the air here is heavy and warm and should objectively not be all that refreshing. But it's comfortable and comforting and it goes well with the starlight. She feels refreshed and rejuvenated and maybe even ready to speak to a stranger.

Which way to the Planet of College Girls?

Her internal compass points, and she sets off.

The walk is longer than she expected.

But her new shoes feel nice to walk in, and her new body feels nice to walk with, and the air is warm and the trees are beautiful and the sky is full of starlight.

As she approaches the bridge, she feels calm and invigorated. Maybe a little nervous, but handling it.

...something feels wrong here. Something feels—like the siren lure of the grave, except instead of being warm and comforting like the whispers under the earth, it's the pull of despair, the need to be erased because surely the world cannot stand to be marred by her presence any longer.

This is perhaps a bad sign about the Planet of College Girls.

But right now she feels full of courage and starlight, and anyway, if she understands her dreams correctly, the worst thing that can happen to her is that she ends up under the forest again waiting for her bones. That's not so bad. She got out of that bed once, she can do it again.

She finds the place where the feeling is strongest, and meditates on the bridge.

On the other side is a broad green lawn, crisscrossed by well-kept paths. Birds are chirping in the morning sun. Girls with brightly coloured hair stroll along the paths, carrying bookbags or backpacks or just binders by the armload.

The undercurrent of despair has vanished.

—and yet, she staggers on the landing.

She can't even tell what's wrong. Maybe nothing is wrong. Maybe she got too used to the comforts of her cozy cave and her welcoming forest, and forgot what it's like to stand in a place that doesn't care about you. Except it can't be that, because the brass place doesn't care about her and it doesn't feel like this there. Standing here, surrounded by peace and happiness, she feels like she's encased in glass, unable to reach out and touch the reality of this world.

Something tugs at her mind, a whisper of thought, an echo of dream. It tells her that this is part of her dream powers, that the more deeply connected to a world she is, the more comfortable she is with it and the more comfortable it is with her; and she has no connections to this world at all beyond the very first step of being able to find it and able to grow more connected. She feels empty in this place because she is empty of it.

It would take such a very long time, to be anything less than empty here. Years. Years and years.

But... maybe that's okay? Maybe she does not need to flee immediately?

It can be a long-term project. She can spend a little time here, now and then. She can venture here looking for strawberries. She can listen to the murmur of conversation as people wander past her in the park, and try to pick up the language a little.

She takes a deep breath and a single step forward.

A passing stranger looks at her, flinches, and hurries past.

Oh, she does not feel good about that.

She glances back at the bridge. On this side, it's in a little gazebo. It looks abandoned; drifts of leaf litter have built up under the benches. There's a faint hint of Arbor's heat in the air, fading as she walks away.

It's hard to walk away from the safety of the forest into the vast unknown of a place full of strangers who flinch when they look at her.

She's done hard things before, though.

It occurs to her, as she walks, that her outfit is very eye-catching and she wishes it were less so. Not much she can do about it now, though.

She tries to listen to the voices around her as she walks. Mostly people are too far away for her to catch the words, but she hears enough to be pretty sure she does not, in fact, speak the language. That will change with time, she's told. She hopes that's true.

There's not much in the way of berry bushes here. She sees what she thinks is a cherry tree, covered in pink flowers, but she's fairly sure you can't grow a tree from flowers... although... her gardening instincts seem to suggest she could grow it from a branch, if she wanted. Particularly with the help of that rich black soil.

She glances around, trying to pick a moment when no one is looking. In a sense it's convenient that everyone seems so reluctant to look at her.

Then she picks a branch that looks right to her dream-instincts, breaks it off as neatly as she can, and hurries back to the derelict gazebo to meditate through the bridge.

A stranger asks her a question, in a language she still doesn't speak.

She hears their voice distantly, and ignores it. The distraction sets her back a little, but she perseveres.

And then she's safe in the forest again, with an embarrassing urge to hug a tree.

Instead, she sits down and resumes meditating, this time going back home to the Cozy Cave. She could've traveled directly there, but—she needed that moment of relief she always feels when she steps into the forest. The Planet of College Girls is just very unsettling.

Right, okay. She has a branch of a cherry tree and she is going to plant it.

Normally (or so her instincts tell her), you have to do a whole lot of things in order to coax a branch to turn into a tree. If, however, you have garden beds full of the rich black loam of the forest, then you can skip most of those steps and instead just jam the branch into the ground and wait. So that's the plan.

While she's out in the garden, she checks on her other plantings. The flowers are doing well, and now that she looks for them, she sees a few silver and copper shoots already coming up in the red sand. The tree at the back of the garden has put up a couple of small black leaves; she has the urge to pat them, but resists. Best not to disturb the little guy so early.

Inspections complete, she looks around for a good spot to plant her cherry tree. That back corner appeals to her, but she didn't put any loam down there, and she's eager to get the branch in the ground without spending a long time preparing first, so instead she plants it closer to the middle of the room, at one end of a long bed that she thinks would look nice as a row of cherry trees eventually.

She has done a difficult and frightening thing and received the reward of possible future cherries, and she feels good about herself. Time to read a book.

This book of pie recipes has lots of pretty pictures!

Ooh.

In theory she could read her botanical guide and see if she can identify any of her flowers, but instead she would like to curl up in her cozy armchair and look at pretty pictures of pie.