—what, jumped in a lake?

She has tried that already.

She takes a deep breath of thin, weak air.

Being despised by all who look upon her is a grindingly awful experience and there's no use denying that.

But she knows why this is happening and she knows how to solve it.

She just has to make it a few years. A few years feels like a long time, but it isn't really.

She should learn how to tell time here, and learn when to get out of everyone's way so they can use their streets in peace. She doesn't like impinging on them like this, she doesn't want to, and she doesn't need to.

But she also doesn't need to curl into a miserable ball and wish death on herself. Death is not available. If she wants to be a tree, she knows where to go.

She wipes her eyes and stands up.

Part of her does yearn, as she turns back toward Arbor, for the peace and simplicity of putting down roots. Part of what makes it a little easier to get up and walk is the thought that she could be walking toward a final resting place where she will never bother anyone again.

But she has decided not to be a tree, and she doesn't plan to go back on that. If she really does think that she should never bother anyone again, she can just not come back to the College Planet in particular.

The bustle tapers off as she walks. By the time she makes it back to the gazebo, all is quiet under the last rays of the setting sun.

And yet she can't shake the sense that she's being watched.

It's probably just paranoia. The experience she just had would make anyone paranoid. Back at home she often felt like everyone around her was disturbed by her presence, but it turns out there's a world of difference between that and seeing them actually act like it.

She stands in the gazebo and closes her eyes and makes her way slowly across the bridge.

Her knees buckle and her hands sink into the loam. Tears prickle in her eyes and her throat aches with stifled sobs.

The air is a warm blanket, and the starlight is a refreshing drink. The trees are happy to see her.

She curls up on the ground and cries, quietly and painfully.

Okay.

Okay. She's okay.

She sits up, pushing her hair out of her face with dirt-caked fingers. She's leaning against the trunk of a tree, which seems concerned for her. She tries to muster a reassuring smile but can't seem to find one anywhere. "I'm okay," she says anyway. "Thank you." The tree reluctantly accepts this.

After a few deep breaths to steady herself, she meditates her way the the Cozy Cave, and heads straight to the bath.

Much better.

After that ordeal, she thinks she would like to spend a long time curled up in her cozy reading nook.

She drifts slowly through the shelves of her library, running her fingers over the spines of the books, thinking about that wonderful one she read earlier with the librarian and the jam. The librarian had a pretty stressful time, too, but she kept trying to connect with people even though it was difficult and upsetting, and eventually she was better off for it.

Here's a slim travelogue titled Journeys of a Conduit.

Sure, that sounds like a place to start.

Retreating to her armchair, she settles in.

It doesn't take her long to figure out that the writer is talking about dream powers like the ones she has (which they say are the mark of a "Conduit"), and a cozy cave house not too different from hers. They call it a "Bevin", and the links between worlds "bridges"—that did start to seem like the right word after she'd been struggling across them for a while—though this person seems to find them much less of a struggle, or is maybe just eliding over the few minutes of effort every time.

Many of these worlds are ones that don't appear in her dreams at all. Rorch, Yomi, Crucible - she kind of hopes she never meets the latter two, though Rorch sounds kind of okay.

Others are more familiar. Brazen, the brass place. Arbor, the starlit forest. Earth, of course, which seems to also be where this person started.

The bleak plane of marble seems to be called "the Prison", and is apparently full of unknown beings encased in stone, and stone that tries to encase you if you stand still for too long, and trees that send blobby rubber minions to attack you if you disturb them. She thinks, perhaps, out of all the worlds she needs to build deeper connections with, she will leave that one for last. In fact she might leave it for never. She can decide when she gets that far down the list.

The writer has heard secondhand of a world called "the Academy", but has never been there, and the few details they've gathered are not conclusive enough to tell whether they mean the same Planet of College Girls she's been to. Still, Academy is admittedly a nicer name.

A few other tidbits of information sound useful to know: connecting to each new world costs more world-investment than the last, if you're not the special kind of Conduit that's good at wandering. She thinks she is probably not that kind. There is such a thing as a "Crown" you can have in only one world, and can't change worlds once you've got one, and it provides all kinds of benefits for that world in particular. She thinks she probably doesn't want one, but it's still good to know she has the option. You can mingle the powers of different worlds together to get something better than what you started with, but it costs the same kind of time investment that you'd use to connect to worlds and accept their powers, about a year's worth.

She gets to the end of the book and reads it over again from the beginning, looking for any more useful tidbits she might have missed the first time through. There are incomplete lists of powers offered by various worlds, but this traveler sampled worlds pretty shallowly, and apart from the ability to grow whole ecosystems in her Bevin and publish books to other people's libraries... well, no, in the privacy of her own cozy cave house she can admit that part of her kind of wants to publish books to other people's libraries. Wait, can she? The book doesn't mention it explicitly, but her dreams think that if she can receive publications she can also transmit them...

Leaving that aside—leaving that aside, she said—there isn't much here that's new to her among worlds she's actually encountered. Apparently some Conduits of the Prison can cultivate the trees and shape the stone, which sounds interesting but not familiar; her dreams, when she consults them, think she is as empty of the Prison as she is of the Academy. The traveler picked up nothing at all from Brazen, and from Arbor only the ability to drink starlight. Earth apparently grants powers, like the one for understanding language, but apart from that one and another one for touching bridges from afar, the traveler has mostly not gained any. Actually, touching bridges from afar sounds very useful. She could move so much more smoothly between worlds if she didn't need to walk for several hours to get between Arbor's bridges.

...hmm...

She chases down the thought, and blinks. Her dreams think she could make a bridge, from any of her worlds to any other. It takes a week, apparently, which is not wholly ideal. But it's something to keep in mind. For now, she's fine with walking. If she ever wants to get to a bridge that's more than a day's walk away, perhaps she will reconsider bridge construction.

She is not confident that this list is comprehensive, and she suspects it could be much better organized, but it's definitely a better list than she had before she wrote it. She tucks it into a desk drawer along with the traveler's journal.

Somehow, even though that wasn't exactly a comforting activity, it's still helped a lot with her mental state. She hardly feels at all like she had a sobbing breakdown an hour ago.

She heads out to the garden to check on all her plants. They're coming along nicely. That cherry tree branch is taking root with improbable speed; when she gives it a gentle wiggle, her gardener's instincts report that they're pretty sure it's been settling in for at least a few days. Some of the little metal sprouts in the sand garden are starting to make little medal buds that might soon become little metal flowers. The iron oak is putting out leaves like they're going out of style.