Okay, sounds like a plan. Ugh, I didn't like having my shields rated the first time, but better under friendly circumstances.

He's very nice. Probably you'll barely feel it, unless you've got some kind of psychic sensitivity, in which case I guess you might. But I get counseling from him sometimes, and I forget he's even reading me until he answers a question I didn't ask.

Sounds like he's good, then. If receptively uncontrolled.

Yeah. Fringe benefits of turning into a horrible fish-monster, I guess. ...no, wait, actually he was psychic before he turned into a horrible fish-monster. Scratch that.

There is a knock at the window. Morty sighs and opens the blinds, revealing Mrs. Carson hovering in the air bearing a glowing platinum scepter.

Bella blinks at the hovering glowing-scepter lady, then bows politely as a hedge and attempts to figure out the window mechanism.

Morty helps! The window opens sufficiently for Carson to swoop through.

"She doesn't speak English, but she's a telepath, so you can-"

"Thank you, Mr. Halliwell, that will be all," she says sharply. He wisely shuts up.

Hello. My name is Elizabeth Carson; I apologize for all of this, and promise that I will do everything in my power to set it right. Do you have any pressing needs?

Isabella Swan, ma'am. If it's at all convenient I'd like my parents not to be too alarmed about my disappearance; they'll probably think I did something really stupid and got eaten either literally or metaphorically, otherwise. I don't know how long I'll be staying but I haven't seen anything that makes it look like I have locally unusual needs, since I'm a human. Morty suggested that I get my shields tested against local psi, which sounds like a good idea.

Carson sighs. It would not be strictly impossible, but the effort involved in getting a message across the dimensional border would be almost as much as getting you across, so we would probably prefer to just get you home. Unless you'd like to stay here for longer than a few weeks, in which case arrangements can be made. If you're identical to local humans, that does simplify accommodating you somewhat. We can test your shields at your convenience, though there are some more urgent matters, such as vaccinating you against various local illnesses and making sure you aren't carrying anything serious yourself.

Carson blinks.

I may need that sentence unpacked a bit.

Thanks, Morty "whispers".

It sounds to me from what Morty's told me that you have a very friendly universe which lets you get away with a lot of science and doesn't kill you, just occasionally drops novel sorts of magic on you to give you a new challenge. Where I'm from, vaccinations are a science fiction thing and anybody trying a stunt like that in real life is lucky if all that happens is they get the disease they were trying to ward off and find it mysteriously resistant to ordinary magical healing.

I don't know, we haven't met socially, I just live there, but it's not the sort of thing you want to guess on if you can avoid it because the last time somebody decided to exploit the tendency of mockdragon handlers not to get pleurisy half the population of the Glorious Mountains died.

Well, we definitely don't want the Glorious Mountains getting hyperplague. Different tack, then - what about magical protection from disease? I can ward you against infection more or less airtightly, and if necessary dispel the ward before you return.

I don't know, is it normal magic or science magic of some kind? I mean, frankly I'm not sure my universe won't decide I've been hanging around bad company and squish me the moment I go back no matter what I do. I'm very tempted not to return and just live here in Science Fantasy Plane.

Liz snorts. I certainly wouldn't blame you. I don't think our magic is particularly sciency, it seems very appropriately mystical to me, but then again I'm not a malevolently insane universe-monster.

How quickly does all this need to be decided?

Not very, but if you want more than a few hours to decide, then I am going to want to put you in quarantine while you do it so that you don't either die or infect someone with space flu. We've got some very nice quarantine facilities, though. Considering.

I don't know that I need hours per se but I do need to know what my options are with respect to contacting my parents, maybe getting some subtle arts textbooks, and generally continuing to exist here if I'm going to do that.

We can arrange that. Long-term parental contact is proportionally less of a problem than short-term; the textbooks we can probably manage using you as a dimensional anchor, or if we're very lucky we might find them in the Great Library; and generally continuing to exist is quite feasible and would be generously subsidized by the Academy by way of apology for putting you in this position in the first place.

That's very kind of the Academy. As long as my parents can be convinced that I have not been vivisected by demons or run afoul of fey or savaged by ogres or something I don't feel the need to contact them on a particularly frequent basis.

That much can certainly be arranged.

What's the Great Library?

...Difficult to explain. A few decades back an unusually unhinged Devisor created a building which... structurally resembles a library, is apparently infinite in volume, and contains, to all appearances, all of the books that have ever been written in any universe. The only problem is that every book is placed completely at random, scrying is very difficult in the stacks, and going too deep can lead through pockets of badly distorted time. There are people with the talent or skill to reliably check books out of the Library, but their services are expensive and always in high demand. Our main hope is that the books you need would crop up in the front thousand shelves or so, which occasionally rearrange their contents and can be scried.

That seems like a fairly thin hope. Maybe my parents could get together a decent curriculum's worth for me and you can just bring that in?