It turns out that the pie book is not in English—it's one of the alphabets she doesn't recognize—which might be a good thing, because if the pie recipes were in English she might be very sad about not having the ingredients to make them. Wait, or does she? She has only ever found bread in her pantry but then she has only ever inspected her pantry very shallowly. Distracted from pie pictures, she gets up and wanders over to the kitchen.

Her pantry does contain butter, flour, and other extremely basic staple ingredients like rice. It doesn't seem to have any jam but it does seem to have mason jars, of the sort with the weird two-part lids that she thinks she remembers you're supposed to seal up by boiling them? The jam future is within her grasp. Just as soon as her cherry tree grows up big and strong. If it's even a type of tree that really does make cherries, which she's not sure of. She should maybe go back to the Planet of College Girls and steal more plants. Or, actually, she should consult her botanical guide and try to identify what she has in her garden.

To the library!

She brings the book out to the garden and flips through it looking for pictures that match her flowers. The gold one seems to be a crocus; the silver one seems to be an iris. She was right about that sunflower—tournesol, it says. The other two copper flowers are harder to identify, but she thinks the one with long narrow petals is clearly somewhere in the aster category, and the smaller one might be a different type of aster? Thank goodness for Latin taxonomy, it makes reading botanical guides in foreign languages so much easier.

As for her trees, she finds pictures that seem to indicate her weird-looking acorn was normal for some species, and she flips through page after page of cherry subspecies without finding any exact matches for the specific flowers on her specific branch. It does seem to be some sort of cherry tree, but she'll just have to wait and see if cherries are in the cards. Really, she should've guessed that plants from different worlds won't necessarily appear in the same botanical guides. She's lucky her metal flowers resemble any Earth plants at all.

She puts her botanical guide back on the desk.

...she has already been to the Planet of College Girls once today, and she doesn't want to go back... but... the more time she spends there, the faster she will gain a deeper connection to it, and also learn its language, and perhaps eventually be able to buy plants instead of pirating them. Maybe... maybe she could take a book there, and sit in the gazebo and read the book?

She looks through her library for a book that seems like it would be interesting to read but not so interesting that she would be sad if someone grabbed it from her and ran off with it.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, by Oliver Sacks?

How thoroughly peculiar. She'll take it.

She meditates through to the forest, and smiles when she feels its warmth.

She meditates through to the gazebo, and peeks out at the paths. Nobody's walking along them, this time. The sun has shifted quite a ways through the sky. Satisfied that she's probably safe from interruptions, she sits down and reads.

It's definitely less relaxing than reading at home, but... nice in its own way? The sunlight, the faint smell of grass. Even though the gazebo is a bit run-down, it's still pretty. Even though its benches are uncomfortable and a little dirty, they're still a fine place to sit. And the book is very weird, but not too bad, really.

When she finishes the book, she sits quietly for a minute, watching the shadows crawl across the floor.

Sticks her hand out into the sunlight, to feel how her body soaks it up. Purer and less satisfying than the many-hued light of the forest, but again, in its own way, it's nice.

So far, the Planet of College Girls hasn't been nearly as scary as it made itself out to be. She can imagine a future where she comes back here every day, to sit and read a book and maybe walk around a little. She can imagine liking that future.

In fact, maybe...

She meditates straight home to the Cozy Cave,

and puts away her book,

and meditates straight back to the gazebo—

—and makes a brief, futile motion of her hands at her waist, and a mental note to include pockets in the next iteration of this outfit—

And she steps out for a little stroll, just to see the sights and spend a little more time absorbing the essence of the world.

It's a lovely world, full of trees and sunlight.

Standing in it still feels a little bit like gasping for air in a vacuum.

It'll get better. She's been told that it'll get better, and so far her dreams have been right about every other thing they've claimed.

And she... wants it to get better?

She wants to be able to go for a nice walk in this pleasant afternoon sun softened by this partly cloudy sky, and not feel slightly terrible the whole time.

She wants to be able to talk to the brightly coloured college girls, and have shallow conversations about what they're studying and what books they like to read.

She wants to be able to find out if there's a store somewhere that will sell plants for her garden so she won't have to steal them.

She could run away from this place—but she doesn't want to.

She tries to stay out of the building complexes and keep to the more park-like areas as she walks. At first she just keeps her internal compass pointed behind her at the gazebo that leads to the starlit forest, but then she idly wonders if there are bridges here to the other worlds she's familiar with. It turns out there are: this way to the brass place, and that way to Earth, and this other way to the bleak expanse of marble...

She stops in her tracks, when she has that thought.

She has ventured into the Planet of College Girls, and is learning to be okay here even though it's scary.

Could she learn to be okay in the bleak place, too? Should she? Is continuing to avoid it just the coward's way out?

...no... no, she doesn't think so. She can focus on one place at a time. It's better, in a sense, to focus on one place at a time, because it means she'll connect with it faster.

Maybe someday she'll try to visit the bleak place, but someday doesn't have to be now.

She keeps walking.

Brightly-coloured college girls begin to trickle out of buildings as the current class period lets out. They steer clear of her, with many worried glances and suspicious murmurs.

...she has to stop, and find an out-of-the-way bench to sit on; she can't make herself keep taking up the sidewalks once she sees someone cross the street to avoid her.

It's upsetting. It feels—like that breath of despair she felt, the first time she approached this world's bridge. It feels like something is wrong, and like she is the thing that is wrong. It feels like Luke yelling at her for cheating on him. It feels like believing what he yelled at her.

It would be so easy to give in, wouldn't it?

The shadows are closing in around her.

She wants to crawl into a hole and disappear. Evidently the entire population of the College Planet agrees. It would be best and simplest for everyone if she just—if she just—