She has arrived in a small field or large clearing within a lightly forested wilderness area; the trees are denser off to her left and sparser off to her right, with the latter view showing glimpses of a grassy slope down to a gently curved road. It appears to be late afternoon or early evening; her shadow stretches out ahead of her, reaching ever farther toward the treeline, as the sun descends to meet the horizon behind her.

The wildlife doesn't seem too concerned by her presence. Unfamiliar birds chatter to one another amid the trees; a black squirrel with a luxurious red-tipped tail dashes across the grass in front of her, and a round fuzzy bee investigates a nearby flower. Nothing is sounding alarm calls or going ominously silent.

That is a slightly weird squirrel. She inspects the bee insofar as it seems safe to do so.

The bee is unusually large and round and fuzzy but has no striking abnormalities on the level of the squirrel's red tailtip. It could just be a big fat bee.

She will tentatively allow the bee. She is not informed enough about plants to inspect the plants. She doesn't have a good view of the birds.

She gets up and tromps roadward.

The road appears to be paved with flat hexagonal bricks. It's easily wide enough for two cars, maybe three, and the surface looks plenty smooth enough to support vehicle traffic without undue bumping and rattling, but there's no trace of paint to suggest a conventional lane setup.

Footing on the downward slope is a little uneven, and if she's not careful she may find herself approaching the road rather faster than she intended.

She did not attempt this steep hill on foot; she scoots undignifiedly on her butt. She could fly it but she doesn't know where she is, and someone might be there.

She looks up and down the road, and picks a direction that won't have her squinting into the sun as she walks, lacking any other distinguishing feature.

This leaves her headed east at first, until the road curves north into the forest.

After a few minutes of walking, she can hear a sound ahead of her, distant at first but growing closer over time. It brings to mind the image of a horse-drawn carriage: the quiet rattle of wheels, the hollow clop-clop-clop of hooves.

She scoots to the margin of the road and slows down so she can duck off it entirely if the carriage is too wide to pass.

The first thing she will notice about the carriage, when it comes into view around another curve in the road, is that it is drawn by unicorns.

They look something like horses, and something like deer, and something like goats, but in size they more closely approximate a moose. Their fur is a pale silvery white, sleek and lustrous in the leaf-filtered rays of the setting sun; their manes float on the air like ethereal silk. Long pointed horns jut out from their foreheads, shimmering like enormous pearls; the tips look very sharp. Their eyes are large, forward-facing, and an unsettlingly bloody shade of red.

Behind the two unicorns in their gem-studded blue-and-silver harness, the carriage rolls smoothly on tall wooden wheels. It's elaborately carved and decorated, following the same blue-and-silver theme as the unicorns' gear; the driver, seated out front holding the blue-and-silver reins, wears a similar livery. He seems human, tired, and very surprised to see her; he blinks, double-takes, and leans forward for a closer look, grabbing the railing of his perch for stability.

Unicorns don't exist - they even less exist than dragons and sphinxes; there is controversy about whether unicorns even used to exist - but those sure seem to be unicorns. She gets out of the way, noting as many facts about the unicorns and the carriage as she can while it passes. She is very lost.

The unicorns eye her malevolently on their way past, but don't break ranks to come after her.

As the carriage draws even with her position, someone opens a curtain on the inside and leans out of it, scowling. He has high cheekbones and pleasingly symmetrical features and long, fine, elaborately braided silver hair, decorated with jeweled silver combs, and his ears come to elegant tapering points, and it's hard to tell in the fading light but his eyes might be violet. His voice, when he addresses the carriage driver in an incomprehensible but very grumpy-sounding shout, is deep and beautiful.

The carriage rattles to a halt. The driver dismounts and hurries toward May, glancing fearfully up at his employer(?)'s scowling face.

"...I don't speak your language," she apologizes to the driver. In English, and then again haltingly in French, and then she manages "I don't know much Japanese" in Japanese.

The driver asks her a question, worriedly, in a language which is none of those and which she definitely does not speak.

"I'm sorry," she says, reverting to English, "I don't speak your language."

He shakes his head slightly, turns back to the carriage, and reports on his lack of progress.

The elf in the carriage scowls harder. Heavy silver manacles appear around May's wrists.

That is not a thing she wanted to happen!

They look heavy, but she can't really feel it; at a short distance, a little farther than the extent of her arm-hairs, they cease to exist, until they've fallen from her hands, eaten away on one side and corroded a little where they still exist.

The elf hisses, and glares intently at her with a look of focused concentration, gesturing sharply behind the curtain.

Whatever he was trying to do, it doesn't.

He yells at the driver, who, looking utterly terrified, grabs for May's arm.

May can't dodge, but she can fall away from him and kick him in the crotch.

The driver doubles over, clutching his groin and whimpering in pain, but nevertheless staggers determinedly toward her.

The elf tries conjuring shackles again, this time encumbering May's shoes and backpack and denim-clad legs. The metal still falls apart on contact with her skin, but it's not making much contact with her skin yet.

She can brush it away like soap bubbles so as to reach into her backpack.

The pain-impaired driver and increasingly furious elf are unable to prevent her from doing this!

And then she has her binder full of scrolls, except scrolls are dumb as a form factor so she has her binder full of neatly three hole punched spells, and she flips to the section with the blue flag, and slaps her palm down on the first one in there and shouts, "SLEEP!"

It's a single-target spell and she aims it at the elf and she doesn't care very much if he happens to sleep for a long time so the casting in English might not be the most gentle option, but he's gonna sleep.

The elf does indeed sleep, immediately, with his head and one arm flopping out of the carriage window.

The driver is by this point reduced to terrified gibbering.

The unicorns are beginning to make restless noises.

May shoots the driver a look. Flips a page. Looks at him expectantly.

He makes pleading noises and no aggressive moves of any kind.

May steps back onto the road and walks in the direction she was originally traveling, listening intently. She doesn't like the look of the unicorns enough to try stealing one.

The driver's moans recede into the distance behind her.

There's not much else to hear, for a little while. Assorted wildlife sounds. Her own footsteps. The sun sets, and the moon rises, looking bigger and differently patterned than she's used to.

She stops when she finds a nice rock or tree stump to sit on to go over the lines of her sleep spell in a fresh layer of pen, before the sun goes down. She inspects the moon with unsurprised concern.

When the sun gets low she keeps a lookout for places it might be safe to sleep, with "not visible from the road" a key criterion.

If she heads deeper into the woods, up the hill to the southwest, she can find a reasonably comfortable grassy hollow with absolutely no line-of-sight from the road.

That is suitable.

She hopes it doesn't get too cold at night; it would be counterproductive to start a fire.

She curls up in the hollow and sleeps.

An hour or so before dawn, when the sky is beginning to lighten on the eastern horizon, she might be awoken by the sound of a small group of people moving briskly through the woods with only a halfhearted attempt at quiet. Or she might not.

The hollow is not so comfortable and she was not so tired as to sleep through something threatening-sounding in this environment.

She rifles through her spellbook with more than a token effort at quiet.

The search party approaches her hollow with a directness that implies they already know approximately where to look. She has about half a minute of spellbook time before the first stranger emerges into view, walking cautiously but fairly casually and scanning the ground for stray humans.

He doesn't look like the sort of person you'd send after someone you intended to kidnap and imprison. He's comfortably dressed, medium-tall, unarmed, and not particularly brawny. A string bag slung over his shoulder holds a round loaf of bread.

Thirty seconds is long enough to hiss herself invisible, but it doesn't cover the backpack, since she isn't wearing it.

He spots the backpack, frowns, and waits for his companions to catch up.

There's three of them in total, all human, all approximately the same degree of harmless-looking, all carrying easily identifiable food items; there's another loaf of bread, and then the third bag contains several oranges and a peach. The first one gestures to the backpack and says something; the three of them exchange looks very much in the vein of 'no, you go inspect the potentially magically hazardous foreign object', and then the fruit-bearer sighs and ties her bag of fruit to her belt to leave her hands free and comes forward to inspect the backpack.

Mariko has a hand ready on a sleep spell and watches what the person does with the backpack.

The backpack contains an insulated lunchbox, several notebooks, spare pens, a map of southern British Columbia, and a water bottle. Her cellphone and wallet are in her pockets, so invisible.

She inventories the backpack, commenting on each item aloud. She's confused by most of them. When she has double-checked that she found everything, she puts it all back, and after a few false starts manages to figure out how to close the zipper.

The three of them look at each other, and exchange the shrugs and short remarks of a group of people who aren't at all sure what to do next but don't feel in an especially big hurry to figure it out.

...May waits till they're all glancing away, then throws a rock into the woods.

They track the sound, look at each other, and then the one who was in the lead the first time starts off toward the source of the noise while the other two remain behind.

An invisible person supervises this activity.

The scout quietly calls back a report on the number of mysterious humans he has found in the vicinity, presumably none; and then the other two start to look nervous. The woman with fruit asks the man with no obvious distinguishing characteristics a question, half-whispered, and he returns an uncertain half-whispered reply, and they glance around as though perhaps afraid of an invisible person lurking in the vicinity. The man with no obvious distinguishing characteristics tentatively holds out his loaf of bread toward thin air and makes some sort of comment, also toward thin air; his fruit-carrying compatriot sighs.

......

.........

She is not going to get far without any contact with civilization at all.

She takes the bread.

The now breadless man jumps back slightly in startlement, but releases his string bag of bread into her invisible custody. He hesitantly remarks aloud on this development. The scout returns on hearing this news, and looks around as though trying to spot the invisible person, before catching himself and stopping with a slightly sheepish expression.

...She puts the bread in her backpack. They'll be able to see that.

They do indeed see that.

The breadless man inhales a steadying breath, looks at the backpack, and invites it to follow him out of the woods, with beckoning gestures and a bit of simple mime to aid communication with potentially non-local-language-fluent backpacks.

The backpack will very cautiously follow him out of the woods but will not speed up to accommodate them if they do.

They are entirely willing to let the backpack set the pace.

Out on the road, there is a much plainer carriage than the last one, its driver's perch occupied by a yawning teenager with pointed ear-tips peeking out of his untidy black hair. He is not nearly as well-dressed as the last elf, nor does he seem remotely as grumpy.

Also, instead of vaguely ominous unicorns, this carriage is attached to a pair of ordinary if unusually beautiful horses.

The mysteriously hovering backpack pauses.

The teenager sits up, stifling another yawn, and waves a cheerful greeting to the backpack. He says something in an inviting tone, asks one of the three humans to open the door so the backpack can see inside, and then points in turn to both the comfortable interior of the carriage and the ladder-accessible roof with its padded benches and sturdy railing.

The backpack approaches the carriage, close enough that May can reach out and touch it and have in mind all the things she would strenuously object to if this carriage were magicked to do them.

The carriage does not exhibit signs of having been magicked in any of those ways, or for that matter signs of having been magicked in any other ways. The teenage elf watches the backpack.

The backpack is being worn by a human teenager, although it has occurred to her during the walk to put her hair over her ears. She has her hand between the pages of a binder.

—he blinks at her, then smiles. He has a heck of a smile.

(The three humans seem very unnerved by this proof of her invisibility, but also willing to stand back and let the friendly elf handle it.)

"I still don't speak your language," she comments.

He shrugs.

Then, with considerable use of gestures but also still speaking out loud the whole time, he contrives to inquire whether she would like to come with him in his carriage to the place he is going, and if so, whether she would prefer to ride outside or inside and where she would like the other humans to sit. He manages to throw in a claim that they have food at his destination, by referencing the food his humans have been carrying.

She gets in the carriage.

She skipped dinner last night and walked a lot and has not eaten yet today. She gets out her sack lunch; it was worth saving overnight but even PBJ doesn't last for a week, so she eats it now, in case some kind of sinister plot that might involve drugged food manifests itself and she will be glad of having delayed consumption of the bread and other offered comestibles.

No one comments on her choice of food. In the absence of a specific answer from her about where everyone else should sit, the woman with fruit gets in the carriage with her and the other two climb the ladder to sit up top.

As soon as everyone's settled, the carriage starts moving; it's a very gentle ride, surprisingly so for the technology level.

She could see if it was magic but depending on how it works it might not come back afterwards and it is not disturbing her, quite the opposite.

She finishes her sandwiches and licks her fingers and takes out a notebook. She turns to a blank page and presents it, accompanied by a pen, to the fruit girl and hopes they have an alphabet.

—the fruit girl blinks at the notebook and pen, and takes them, and... mimes writing, hesitantly? Is this what she's supposed to be doing with these?

May nods. ...Takes them back, writes out the Roman alphabet illustratively: see, there are yea many, and they are all represented here, what's yours? Please don't be Magic Chinese People. Japanese is fine, they at least have alphabets.

Ah! She nods comprehendingly and writes out a different alphabet, with a couple of false starts as she figures out the unfamiliar writing instrument. It's reasonably short and tidy - twenty-six letters, in fact.

Excellent. May points at each one and solicits its sound.

The fruit girl follows along, uttering appropriate phonemes.

All in all, the inventory comes to ten vowels and fifteen blessedly regular consonants - or at least, she's not stumbling over any of these the way an English-speaker might if called upon to explain the behaviour of the letter C on short notice. The described sounds, one to a letter, are n, m, l, r, s, sh, th, z, t, d, v, f, p, k, h, a, e, i, u, o, ya, ye, yi, yu, and yo.

May dutifully transliterates as she goes. When she has them all, she introduces herself: "May." And points at the others, each in turn, and guesses and writes spellings of their names.

The fruit girl introduces herself as Lilaima, and the two humans they can't see through the roof of the carriage as Vilau and Asem, and the elf they can't see through the front of the carriage as Imra. She is happy to provide local spellings for all of those if asked.

May wants to guess first! Are her phonetic guesses right?

They are! Lilaima congratulates her. At least, that was probably a congratulation. It sounded congratulatory.

May guesses how to spell that too.

It went by a little fast and so Lilaima has to correct a letter from n to m, but yes, the word is sumzakinai.

Good. Now confident in the regularity of spelling May can start a glossary. Numbers, directions, colors?

Numbers work in base ten and have associated numerals which Lilaima will provide on request. Directions and colours are all fairly straightforward. This is a pretty language whose words tend to sound nice.

Lovely. Body parts, food items, shapes.

Lilaima looks like she is maybe getting a little bored of this, but dutifully continues providing vocabulary. She has to correct a few spellings where it was not obvious to an English-speaking ear that there should have been a double letter there; apparently Nenastine does those. That's just about the only irregularity that emerges, though.

That is a tolerable amount of irregular spelling. Can she get pronouns? Species names? Are any conjunctions emerging from commentary between glossary entries?

Pronouns: not gendered, but apparently speciated in the second and optionally the third person; Lilaima points at the front of the carriage to indicate the sort of person who goes with the alternate sets, and seems to be struggling to convey another distinction which might be about formality levels. Species names are comparatively simple, and if she's on the hunt for conjunctions she can scare a few out of the underbrush.

Coming along nicely. What can she get in the way of verbs?

Lilaima is getting steadily less confident as the language lesson continues.

Imra, who has apparently been following this entire conversation from up front despite being unable to see any of the gestures or writing, offers a few helpful comments and suggestions that prompt Lilaima toward more useful avenues of communication. Verbs ensue.

"Thank you!" she calls, not expecting too strongly that Lilaima will be able to figure out what that confidently enough to offer a translation, but maybe Imra will figure it out.

He laughs and calls back something that may very well be 'you're welcome', and then manages to coach Lilaima through a confirmation of what that exchange meant and a translation of 'thank you' into Nenastine, and then the carriage rolls to a halt and he hops down from the driver's seat to open the door. Lilaima looks mildly scandalized; he steps back to let the two of them exit the carriage without offering any further assistance.

It's still earlyish in the morning, but the sun is well above the horizon by now. The castle they've stopped in front of casts a long shadow across the goat-strewn fields that surround it. It's a very pretty castle; it does some amazing things with stone. Sufficiently amazing that May might want to take care not to argue with the walls, actually, in case that lacy arch is held up by magic.

May picks no architectural fights. She admires the castle, and giggles softly at the goats and how everywhere they are, and tucks her notebook under her arm and swings her backpack onto her back. Steps out of the carriage carefully.

Standing on level ground instead of perched out front of the carriage, Imra is a little taller than May but not inhumanly so or anything. He smiles at her and then beckons her to follow him into the castle.

In for a penny. She ambles after him, watching her step.

He seems briefly distracted or perturbed by something, when they get a few steps away from the carriage, but whatever it is it clears up after a second or two.

Into the castle they go, and up some unnecessarily beautiful stairs, and along an unnecessarily beautiful hallway, and into an only moderately beautiful study where Imra gestures invitingly at a comfy chair.

Okay. That chair better not try to magic her or it will have trouble.

The chair seems to be unharmed by contact with May! It presumably was not trying anything sketchy.

Imra goes to a bookshelf, reaches for a book, hesitates, frowns, reaches for a different book, hesitates, frowns again, then turns back to May and conjures an unnecessarily beautiful small wooden statuette of a sleeping goat. It sits up in his hands, hops forward to stand on thin air, turns in a circle, sprouts wings, flaps them, and vanishes. He names this phenomenon: magic.

She repeats the word, guesses a spelling, adds to her glossary.

Okay. So.

"You have magic."

"Yes," she says, because this is obvious.

He frowns slightly in thought, trying to figure out how to get at the heart of the problem as efficiently and accurately as possible.

—okay, quick illusory history lesson.

An image of the continent forms in midair, set in a circle of ocean that fades out of visibility at the edges. Buildings in the old human architectural style - they look vaguely Bronze Age, lots of stone and clay brick - appear, in stylized simplicity and exaggerated size. Little illusory humans scamper between them, wearing pre-invasion human clothing and going about the business of their pre-invasion human lives. Some of them have a pale glow around their heads, and those ones can do things like construct entire buildings telekinetically, or teleport from one end of the continent to the other, or have silent conversations conducted via eye contact alone without the gestures and mouth movements the other humans seem to require.

After a minute of this, a portal appears in midair over the continent, and elves pour out of it, taller than the humans and with pointier ears. The glow symbolizing magic centers on their hands, and they all have at least a little of it, and they use it to good effect in their immediate conquest of the planet: illusions, conjuration, manipulation of living things. They get the humans subjugated in short order, and immediately exterminate all the ones known to have magic.

Some of the haloed humans manage to keep their heads down, so to speak, and avoid tipping the conquerors off; but then they have little illusory fast-forwarded children, and the children are less discreet, and the elves kill their whole families. A few fast-forwarded generations go by, and a couple of haloed babies appear in families with no prior magic users at all, and when those are found out the elves kill them too, and usually also their parents and siblings and definitely always their children if they managed to hide their powers long enough to have any.

He pauses the illusion and waits for a response.

This is very concerning! She lacks the vocabulary for how concerning this is!

Yeah, she's getting the idea. Okay. He moves on to the next phase:

An elf conceives a child with a human slave. (The actual conception takes place inside an illusory building, but the intent is fairly clear.) The child is born with the halo of magic shining brightly around both its hands and its head, and when it grows up and demonstrates how powerful it is in both forms of magic, the elves panic and kill it and come together in a continent-spanning council to discuss the subject, and then the next time an elf has a child with a human, the neighbours find out and murder the baby and drag the elven parent in front of the council for a scolding.

The illusion of the continent cycles through the seasons of the year a few times, then blurs through them at an impossible-to-follow pace, demonstrating the passage of a considerable amount of time.

Then it slows back down to normal time. An elf meets a human girl in a forest, and they spend a while sitting by a lake and talking and holding hands, and then she produces a tiny baby with the telltale hybrid glow—and the baby goes home with his father, and grows up in a blur of seasons into a miniature Imra.

"So that's why my family's willing to help you," he says, dismissing the illusion. "I'm a halfblood. Half human, half elven. And I could teach you Nenastine a lot faster if you'd let me use magic to do it."

Her glossary doesn't cover more than one word in three, out of that, but he hopes she'll get the gist.

She looks up the words she thinks she's heard before as fast as she can, when he talks. "Magic teach?" she asks.

Two little illusion humans, one with the glow of magic. Both speaking different languages, represented by clouds of letters issuing from their mouths in different scripts. The one with the glow waves their hand dramatically, and then the one without switches alphabets to match.

"Human magic can do that. Human magic does minds and movement."

She doesn't have 'minds' in her glossary but she does have "words" so the use of a different term has potentially worrying implications.

"Hmm?"

"Minds is word... uh, before words are, minds do?"

—he has to take a moment to disentangle that, but then, "Yes, exactly."

"Mind magic..." Wobbly gesture, leery expression. "Words magic good, mind magic no. I no some magic, I no no words magic, you words magic?"

"Ye-es?" he says tentatively. "If I'm understanding you right, I think that's what I'm going for."

"Okay," she says, waving a hand.

And:

Hello! Welcome to Nenassa, I'm sorry it's so horrible here! Please don't tell anyone I'm a halfblood, I will die.

I won't. Not that I can. It wasn't obvious if you were going to magically teach me the language or just talk like this, so I allowed both, but I'd rather not leave gaps I don't need -?

Oh, I'm going to magically teach you the language too, but I've never actually done it before and I don't make a habit of being hasty about trying new magic especially when it's mind stuff. So it might take a few minutes. I can talk to you in the meantime, I'm a good multitasker.

Okay. It probably just won't work if you accidentally try to do something else but I don't think I can stop you from accidentally confusing the words for tea and elephant while you're handing them over, so, do watch out.

Your magic's very weird. Well, I guess all magic is weird from the point of view of people with different magic.

Mine's weird at home too.

Huh. What's your home even like?

I can't do illusions. Does this let me send pictures?

It should!

Here is May's memory of the image of the Earth from space, turning, its dark half sparkling with cities.

Here is downtown Toronto, full of humans and human artifacts as far as the eye can see.

Here is the view from an airplane taking off, peeking past the wing to watch the ground fall away.

Wow.

It has its moments. Magic isn't common knowledge, and neither are species other than humans; approximately the same subset of people - mostly the non-humans - know about both.

...How do you even do all that without magic?

Imagine showing someone who hadn't invented the bow and arrow how you could kill an animal from fifty yards.

...huh. Nice analogy.

Thanks, I stole it from Star Trek.

What's that?

It is a series of stories about someone's speculation on what it will be like when we have invented even more things.

...he giggles.

It's a whole genre!

That's a pretty good genre to have!

I like it.

Anyway, it's customary for nonhumans to masquerade as humans with magic, sometimes so effectively that a few generations later they don't remember they aren't.

Thaaat sounds like it might get awkward!

It can be a little when they find out! But the masquerading is very effective, so it isn't if they don't.

I suppose. Go on.

There are lots of nonhuman species. Some of them can't use the magic that allows them to pretend to be human, and those hide, in case humans would be startled and hostile to notice them.

People get startled and hostile regrettably often about that sort of thing.

It's so regrettable.

Many of the nonhuman species have magic of their own, but some, and humans, do not. Everyone can learn a fiddly complicated kind of magic, and everyone can use artifacts made with it, but it's significantly a lost art, and one thing we don't know how to do any more is the magic that lets people seem human - that passes on to children without separate artifacts, but then to stop seeming human they need one of the ancient artifacts. They're scarce now.

Sounds tough for - well, most everybody.

Yup. Also, most of them are species-specific, so they can't even slosh around to accommodate things that are more common now instead of species that have gone extinct.

Ouch.

Yup. So there's a shrinking population of people who can move around in global society and also turn into whatever they actually are, and growing populations of humans, people who might as well be or outright think they are humans, and 'monsters', the mildly impolite term for people who can't use ancient artifacts at all which has no politer equivalent.

Complicated. Does nobody have an angle on figuring out the transformation artifacts again?

Oh, I do, but I seem to have accidentally transported myself here.

Unfortunate. In theory it's possible to send you back, but portals are stupidly dangerous if you don't get them exactly right.

Dangerous how?

Oh—okay, quick elven magical theory lesson. Portals are a branch of illusioncraft - the hardest branch, one step past conjuration. To conjure something, you first make an illusion of it and then make the illusion real; to make a portal, you make an illusion of a sort of door or window to a place, and you make it even more real than you'd need if you were just conjuring it, and if you did it right you have a portal to the place. If you didn't do it right, you have a portal to an illusory place that looks exactly like the place you were trying to reach, and the first time you close the portal everything on the other side is lost forever.

Well that's really unfortunate. What is the distinction between doing it right versus not?

We're not totally sure, which is part of what's so terrifying about portals! The only person in the world who I know for sure can make a working portal is the Emperor and, uh, it would be a bad idea on a number of levels to try to have a chat with him about magical theory. Even though I bet it would be fascinating if I could get him to sit still for it.

Yeah, I didn't get the impression of a culture run by a really admirable sort.

He's, um... a very mixed bag. There's actually a lot less infighting in the court these days, which is good because when elven nobles fight they do it by buying trained slaves and making them kill each other, but on the other hand he personally kills something like two or three a week in his own bedroom, and his example has encouraged a bunch of other people with similar interests. On top of that he is also just not very good at running an empire and has to rely a lot on the higher ranks of the nobility to keep order for him. Apparently his father was much better in nearly every respect but was hugely unpopular because he cared about reducing mistreatment of humans and most elves are strongly in favour of continuing to mistreat humans.

Do they have some less sadistic sounding reason on top of that? Like, Earth humans have enslaved each other before, but usually at least had economic pressure or flimsy religious justifications.

Elven culture is just kind of... like that. I think if they didn't have humans to pick on they'd be doing it to each other. Which may be a substantial part of why they're so keen on the current setup. Nenassa was actually founded by a group of elves who were so desperate to flee their own world that they opened a portal to a new one without any idea of where they'd end up and then ran through it, although the story goes that they did take the sensible precaution of tossing a captured prisoner through and closing and reopening it to see if the prisoner vanished.

I guess that is a sensible precaution. Your elf parent is special because...?

My father's father was the unusually progressive dead emperor's best friend. And my mother is... her own long complicated slightly incredible story.

I won't say I have nothing scheduled but I'll say I wasn't going to be on time anyway.

Fair enough. This one's an even bigger secret than the halfblood thing, though. Nobody outside my family knows I'm a halfblood but they at least know halfbloods are real. It would be very bad news for a whole lot of people if word got out that my mother is a dragon.

May turns into a dragon.

Imra bursts into a fit of hysterical giggles.

She turns back.

Still giggling.

Still giggling.

Stiiiiill giggling.

Okay there we go. "Wow," he says. "What a coincidence. —did the language come through okay?"

"Seems like it! That's very handy. So anyway yeah I'm probably one of the last two living Earth dragons and I only think it's two because my parents are both alive."

"That's incredible. —oh, up to you, but you might want to keep the mindspeech channel open by default, I cannot overstate how useful it is to be able to have fully private conversations. Elves have much better hearing than humans; I'm soundproofing this room with illusioncraft, I do that by default most of the time, but it doesn't work as well in open spaces and there's times when it would be rude or otherwise notable and times when the person I need to talk to isn't in the same room to begin with."

"Okay, that seems probably harmless. Uh, warn me if you're gonna do load-bearing magic. I can control my suppression thing but it also works without activation or feedback based on what my naive opinion of the magic would be."

"That sounds simultaneously very useful and very inconvenient. And yeah, I noticed that I couldn't put an illusion on you directly, I had to come up with a clever workaround to make you look less obviously strange and interesting on the way up here from the carriage."

"I can let you do it, if it's important, that's not hard or anything, but I didn't know you were trying, so..."

"Yet another reason why it would be useful to be able to talk to you without anyone else noticing!"

"And you can do that too, having explained it. Uh, what happened to the elf I put to sleep for trying to kidnap me?"

"He remains asleep. I'm... really not sure what to do about him when he wakes up. Possibly just tell him that he dreamed the whole thing, which would honestly be more plausible than any version of the thing that actually happened. But if he doesn't buy that he could make trouble for us."

"What about his, uh, slave, the one who did not fall asleep and did get kicked in the nuts."

"He has seen a healer and been reassured that my family doesn't blame him for any of this. He's fine for now. We might end up buying him if his current owner does decide to blame him for everything; I don't want him confirming the 'found a magic human by the side of the road' story under torture and also, you know, don't want him getting tortured in the first place."

"Naturally. This is really a very good language transfer power, it's idiomatic and everything."

"I like my magic! I wish I lived in a world where I didn't have to hide two-thirds of it!"

"Well, you know, that part could be worse."

"True. Uh, speaking of which - your options for safely existing in this world are 'we pretend you don't exist', 'we pretend we own you', or 'Mother goes to ask the dragons if you can stay with them', and I'm not at all sure the dragons will say yes. Even though you are... also in some sense a dragon. Although you're definitely in a better position that way than if you weren't. So, uh, I'm sorry about what a bad set of options that is."

"What does pretending to own me consist of?"

"I'm... not entirely sure how to answer that question, never having had to explain it before."

"To whom would you keep up this pretense and how often would I be seen thereby, what purpose would you be pretending I had qua property, what are the typical markers of property behaviorally and sartorially..."

"Well - you've met Lalaima and Asem and Vilau, and you've seen how they are with me. That's the way it is for most of the humans in this household, although the ones who are originally from outside Grandfather's lands tend to be more deferential, and you don't look local, you look more northwestern and this is the southeast. You'd have to pretend to be about like that to anyone who wasn't a member of my immediate family - even Grandfather doesn't actually know I'm a halfblood, we weren't sure enough that it would be safe to tell him. I picked those three for the expedition because I knew they'd definitely keep quiet about anything weird they saw, but I'd rather not give them any more deadly secrets to keep if I can help it, it's not fair to them."

"Uh-huh. And how would we go about pretending I don't exist?"

"We'd find you somewhere to hide - I'd probably dig out an extra basement somewhere under the castle with magic and then put permanent soundproofing and assorted other concealment illusions on it - and sneak you food and books and so on, probably by having me teleport in and conjure things once every few days."

"Can these solutions be combined with the ask-dragons option?"

"Mm, yes? And for that matter they can be combined with each other, I can dig you a place to hide and hide you there but you can come out occasionally and pretend to be one of ours who's not around often. Humans in this province have pretty good freedom of movement, at least compared to anywhere else, it wouldn't be that weird."

"Okay, a mixed strategy sounds ideal. Pretend I'm yours when I'm not introverted enough to pretend I don't exist, wait for dragons. Thank you for your hospitality."

"You're welcome. Is it weird that I'm embarrassed not to have solved interspecies relations yet? Like - I already knew it was important, but now we've got a visitor and my world is inadequate and I clearly haven't been doing enough to fix it!"

"I don't have enough background to know what time frame would be reasonable! Anyway, I could have shown up a hundred years ago or a hundred years from now for all you knew, there was no known reason to hurry on my account."

"Fair enough."

"Am I just lucky in where I landed, or did you have some clever way to be notified when mysterious lost humans sleepified dickhead elves?"

"You're mostly just lucky in where you landed. We do keep an eye out for rumours that might be halfbloods or humans with magic, and I might've heard about you and come to rescue you later, but instead the driver came right to our castle because we were the closest major settlement."

"Okay. I can wake the guy up, if he's still sleeping it off, I overcast the spell."

"Probably better if you don't go near him again, less risk of giving him evidence you still exist. I wonder if it would be a good idea to illusion a different face on you, actually, for when you're out and about."

"Makes sense. I don't know how long he'll sleep on an overcast spell, though, it might be dangerous if he's not getting water? I don't know how elves work."

"I can keep him healthy with lifecraft and if he sleeps through too much of the day I can try to wake him up myself."

"Okay. I can always turn invisible again and unsleep him surreptitiously if that doesn't work."

"I'd have to cover you with a sound illusion too, otherwise it'd just be really obvious that there was an invisible person there. And I'm not perfect at those when the thing I'm hiding is less stationary than a room with four solid walls."

"Still, seems like a bit much to leave him asleep for six weeks or whatever for being a member of the species, and I really overdid the spell." Sigh. "Could try to invent an inaudibility spell but I don't already have one."

"How's inventing spells work? Is it learnable?"

"Yes. I don't know if that extends to people from other worlds but there's no obvious reason it shouldn't. I can cheat pretty outrageously on it though."

"Oh?"

"The big problem with spells is that all the spell components do a lot of different things. So you find ones that mostly do what you want, and then you cancel the extra, and then you cancel the extra of the extra, and so on, more layers the more oomph you need the spell to have. I can just touch the spell while I cast it and it won't do anything I don't want it to, but if I want to publish them for other people I have to be as careful as anyone else."

"I see. That does sound handy."

"Yes. Also, most people have to cast in a non-native language. Using your native language overpowers the spell - any imperfections in the cancellations, and there are always going to be at least tiny ones, are magnified, and you wind up with people sleeping for days. I usually cast in French when I'm working in front of people, but for the same reason if I'm alone or no one will know what I'm doing anyway I can use English."

"Interesting. I wonder whether magically obtained languages count as native or otherwise for the purpose."

"Don't know, but I'm the person to attempt to safely find out, aren't I?"

"Evidently so!"

She flips through her binder. "Things I can allow to overpower, notice they're overpowered, and fix without serious consequences... I could see if I stay invisible for longer than expected but that'll take hours..." Flip flip. She flips back to her used invisibility spell to go over it in pen.

"It's also possible there's things you can fix easily with my help that you couldn't have otherwise," he suggests. "Although maybe not, I don't know what you've got in there besides sleep and invisibility."

"I have those and light and fire control and fire suppression and water boiling and water control and water purification - uh, I was on a sort of magic experimentation camping trip, when I appeared here - and earth shaping and a first draft of teleportation that works for me if I know where to go but I wouldn't trust for anyone else yet."

"What happens if you overpower water control...?"

"Uh, it goes where you tell it to but too hard or with too much water doing it at once, I guess? I haven't tried that yet."

"Hmm. Could probably clean that up without too much trouble, but maybe not in here."

"It'd risk flooding, if I deliberately allow the overcast to go through."

"On what scale, though?"

"I don't know, I haven't tried it!"

"Do you have a guess between 'do the experiment in a room with nothing we'd be sorry to lose', 'do the experiment in a house we wouldn't be sorry to lose', and 'take a trip to the beach'?'"

"I don't know! I don't have accurate results on this because other people always cast in non-native languages and when I overcast there's always the confounding factor."

"I suppose that makes sense. Inconvenient for figuring out which spell to try, though. Possibly the conclusion is that properly cautious precautions for anything other than invisibility will take longer to set up than the invisibility will to run past its allotted time."

"Likely. I could make something else besides me invisible."

"That'd be less inconvenient. Oh, by the way, I want to verify something—"

He conjures a handful of glittering gemstones, in assorted shapes and colours, and holds them out to her.

"Can you try - doing the suppression thing at those? I want to see if the ones that are properly conjured count as still magic enough to destroy. They shouldn't, but it'd be interesting and potentially useful if they did."

"Uh, sure." She reaches out for one, wishing that it not exist.

That one vanishes!

But when she's tried them all, two out of the five remain.

"Well, you won't be able to singlehandedly knock down the palace," he concludes.

"Hm. I don't think it makes a difference but just in case -" Reaching hand goes clawed. It makes no difference. "Mkay." She returns it to handedness.

"And now we have these conveniently useless objects for you to experimentally turn invisible!" he says, offering her a diamond the size of a grape.

"I guess you don't have scarcity making them valuable, huh." She flips to the invisibility section and casts an overpowered spell in English. The diamond vanishes and she sets it down. "I can try the other one in this language to see if it's more like English or more like French."

He hands her the second gem, an equally enormous sapphire.

"They are kind of scarce overall, actually, because true conjuration is not a very common talent and most people who can do it have better things to do than pour gemstones into buckets all day. But since it's a talent I happen to have, they're not meaningfully scarce to me."

"Makes sense." She flips to another spell and translates her incantation into, "Be unseen, let light pass unaltered through you, invisible to every eye and sensor." And then she draws over the used spells again.

"The vague hints about the principles of this magic are fascinating," he comments.

"It's a pretty neat system. I'm lucky I landed with my backpack or I'd be stuck with the runes I can draw from memory, which I can get things done with alone but nobody else could."

"Where do new runes come from?"

"If you have a bunch that all share a meaning, you can derive new ones from them, but I don't know where the first ones came from."

"Really? How's that work?"

"There's this intolerably complicated deterministic process for how you can draw them all out in a ring around a blank center space and make marks in the middle according to what's on the outside. This means you can get different results depending on what position and permutation the ones in the ring are, and that there are thousands of runes that have any given meaning, though they'll vary widely in how much of it they have. My rune dictionary only has five thousand runes total, which is plenty for most purposes, but sometimes if I want to make a spell really elegant I'll derive a few to see if any of them are convenient or fit more neatly into a diagram."

"Wow. Now I kind of have an urge to spend a week sitting around deriving runes."

"It gets old! But I've done it a lot to make sure I remembered the process - dictionaries are weirdly scarce, I wanted to be sure I'd be okay if mine were lost or damaged, so I did my best to memorize the process in addition to copying out most of the contents of the book onto a computer."

"Huh. Weirdly scarce like how? Is there a known reason...?"

"Well, for people who aren't dragons, learning magic is dangerous. There's a medallion shortage, but that comes up only a handful of times in a person's life, it's not a problem that really eats at you once you've saved up enough for one and so have any of your kids who want them and stuff. No one knows how to hide Avalons anymore, but the ones we have still work - those are little towns illusioned so humans don't run across them by accident. So it's this really dangerous thing you could learn to do and then if it didn't kill you you'd be able to, what, turn invisible? Not that useful in most people's day to day - and drawing out the spells is tedious - so it's not a growing field and books don't sell well - so you'd have to be pretty determined to find one -"

"Ohhhh dear. Yeah, that makes sense."

"And I really wanted to learn magic, and I guess some other people do too because you can buy modern magic items in stores in Avalons, but it's not common and nobody's recovered all our lost knowledge yet. But I'm hoping to - uh, if I ever go home, I'm hoping to learn programming and automate rune derivation and first draft spell composition, plus figure out medallions, and maybe blow open the whole secrecy thing because that can't go on forever and it would be better to do it in a controlled manner."

"That sounds like about what I'd be doing, if I'd grown up in your world."

"A kindred spirit. So, by extension, if I'd grown up in yours..."

"My major project is trying to end slavery, obviously, but next on the list after that is figuring out how to make it possible for dragons to safely reveal their existence to the rest of the world."

"How're you going about it?"

"Working on the province first. Grandfather was treating his humans... mostly adequately... before Father came along, and Father made some improvements before he met Mother and even more improvements afterward, and I'm trying to actually get people to the point where they can play the role for outsiders but don't think of themselves as ours - and meanwhile trying to figure out if I can get an angle on the Emperor. I know exactly one encouraging fact about him, which is that he's extremely direct and straightforward and contemptuous of dishonesty, so if I can get to know him and somehow convince him that perhaps we shouldn't be keeping humans as slaves after all, I won't have to worry about him nodding and smiling and stabbing me in the back ten minutes later like I would with literally any other elven noble who is not one of my own personal family members. —That's a slight exaggeration but not a big one; the culture is... pretty bad about that sort of thing."

"It seems like you'd have to be dishonest or at least lie by omission a lot to get to know somebody without revealing, like, your complicated species."

"Yeah, that's among the many reasons why I haven't yet tried this. He's also famously volatile - nasty temper, negligible self-control - and while he really shouldn't try to fight me over a minor disagreement, I can't guarantee that he won't, and although I could probably actually kill him in single combat if I really had to, the effects on Nenastine politics would be... explosive. Especially since I'd probably have to reveal at least one of my complicated bloodlines to do it. So, hanging back until I've got a better idea of how to handle him."

"An idea based on learning more about his personality or something else?"

"Mm, not necessarily just about his personality - I'm seventeen and he's several thousand, I've got a lot of context to catch up on if I want to properly understand his perspective, even though most of it probably isn't crucial?"

"I meant, you're leaning towards a more persuasion-flavored solution as opposed to, like, arranging to deal with the fallout after killing him in single combat."

"The fallout of killing him in single combat would be... bad. Better to at least sink a few years into the persuasion angle before giving up on it and moving to focus on violence."

"Should I be imagining something more elaborate than what happens if people assassinate evil rulers of countries where I'm from? What's the deal?"

"He doesn't have an heir or even any especially close relatives, so thirty different people would each immediately make a separate violent grab for the throne, and if I had to reveal I'm a halfblood they'd also all be trying to kill me at the same time, and if I had to reveal I'm a dragon they'd be trying to kill me and heading out into the desert to exterminate the dragons. Also, even if the Emperor absolutely started it and it was definitely all his fault, and even if everyone knew that, I and by extension my family would still be in big trouble for breaking the taboo against seriously harming another elf of the same social class - the proper civilized way to resolve an argument that gets too heated for ordinary diplomacy is by having specially trained slaves fight to the death over it."

"- wait, how would they know where to go to exterminate the presumed exterminated dragons?"

"It's really the only place they could be if they're still on land, and in fact many people are superstitiously afraid that there may still be dragons there. If they knew there were still dragons there they'd kill them, but it's considered childish to openly believe in dragons still existing, so anyone proposing taking an army into the desert to make really sure would look like an idiot."

"Gotcha."

"It's actually a really convenient level of disbelief. If nobody was superstitious about dragons, somebody probably would've moved into the desert by now."

"It's not one of those inhospitable deserts? Or it could be made hospitable?"

"Conjuration can do a lot for an initially inhospitable climate! But it's definitely easier to live somewhere that was already capable of supporting life when you got there."

"Instant farmland, just add water."

He giggles.

"I didn't think that would translate but I said it anyway."

"It's a confusing sentence but a hilarious mental image!"

"There's a genre of invented convenience foods where the most significant step in preparation is adding water. And 'just add water' is a line from advertisements for those."

"I'm getting such a picture of your world from these partial explanations and offhand remarks, and I can hardly even tell if it's an accurate one."

"I can tell you more stuff about it more systematically, especially once I have a better sense of here to compare to, but honestly I think this might be more fun."

"You might be right."

"How long will it take to make me a hidey-hole?"

"Not sure. I've never actually dug out a secret underground house before."

"Neither have I. I guess it'd be a good time to try out my earth control spell if that wouldn't be too conspicuous."

"I should pick somewhere that's good for concealing construction anyway... hmm, maybe the old wine cellar, it's an awful little maze and I can think of a few corners where I could build a hidden door without too much trouble."

"I will be a cask of the finest Amontillado. - that is a reference to a famous short story."

"Oh?"

"Guy is annoyed with another guy, lures him into a basement by claiming to have some very nice wine called Amontillado, and then bricks him in the basement."

He giggles. "Ideally once I have put you in the basement you'll be able to leave! Although also ideally you won't actually leave very much because I think pretending you're nothing out of the ordinary will be hard."

"Well, if your language magic made me literate you can load me up with books and maybe something it'd be good to have a rune-spell for, and that'll keep me for a while."

"I will supply you with numerous books. Can I ask you to stay here for a few minutes while I go scope out the awful maze to see where best to start digging? You can think at me if anything unexpected happens."

"Sure thing."

"See you soon!" Off he trots, leaving her alone in the room with her stuff and her invisible gemstones and the comfy furniture and the bookshelves.

She writes down a little chart of the gemstone experiment for future reference and looks at book titles.

Like half of the books in this cozy little study appear to be about horse breeding. Some are instead about human breeding, but, on closer inspection, have horse-breeding-relevant sections. Then there's unicorns, goats, camels... in fact, just about the only book in the room that's not about some form of animal husbandry is The Legend of the Dragon, tucked away inconspicuously on a shelf behind her chair.

.......okay she is going to look at, like, the table of contents of a human-breeding book, and then assuming there's nothing so fascinatingly horrid she must read on, she will read the dragon book.

This table of contents advertises chapter headings such as Common Illnesses, Humans Are Not Unicorns!, Signs of Magic, Training, and A Cautionary Note. Up to her how fascinatingly horrid she finds them.

That's actually all fascinatingly horrid besides the common illnesses and come to think of it she can catch human illnesses and should look through it.

The Common Illnesses chapter starts out with an acknowledgment that of course if you can afford an expert lifecrafter to cure your humans' diseases that's your best option, but, if your budget for that sort of thing is limited, here is some advice on how serious an illness probably is given symptoms, and what to do about it if you're not paying someone to cure them for you.

- Diarrhea: Always a bad sign, but you only need to start worrying if it lasts more than a day or if it's going around the pens in large numbers. Feed the afflicted humans as much broth as they can stand, and make sure someone's cleaning up after them very thoroughly.
- Coughs and sneezes: Isolate the afflicted humans to the extent you can afford; if it's this or that season, wave this list of likely flowers in their face to see if what you have is a human with allergies. If the cough is lasting longer than a few days, or sounds, like, awful, probably best to call a lifecrafter if you want to save the human. Definitely call a lifecrafter if it's spreading like wildfire.
- Fever: Often a bad sign. Isolate in a reasonably cool area, give plenty of water, and call a lifecrafter if more than a few of your humans are affected.
- Gross-looking sores: Are you sure you're not just overworking your human? Fragile human skin gets into all sorts of nasty situations if the human is pushing their squishy body to its limits! If a bandage and a few days' rest doesn't help, it might be time to involve a lifecrafter.
- Skin falling off: Is it red and blistery? Is your human really pale? Do they get a lot of sun? Yeah they'll be fine, this just happens. Fragile human skin is like that. If they're not getting a lot of sun, or other forms of external skin damage like heat or cold or abrasion, then you can start worrying.
- Certain very specific lists of symptoms: Your problem is that your humans are having a lot of sex with each other. Call a lifecrafter and have them check your overseers too, just in case. Yes, even if they claim they haven't been indulging. Not every disease like this crosses the species barrier, but enough of them do that it's worth making sure. Shocking as this may sound, an elf with weak enough lifecrafting skill could potentially even die of an illness they caught from a human!
- Some illnesses present with primarily behavioural symptoms! Often these are not contagious; sometimes they're less an illness and more a matter of the human being sluggish because they haven't been fed, watered, or rested enough, or because they're too hot or too cold. (Humans are fragile!) However...
- ALWAYS call a lifecrafter if you see a human acting listless and twitchy and not responding to commands, no matter how likely you think it is that they're just being insubordinate, and after the lifecrafter has checked every human you own, please go spit on the grave of the idiot who decided to see what happens if you infect a human with unicorn brain fungus. Your human almost certainly does not have unicorn brain fungus but it's REALLY IMPORTANT TO CHECK. The author personally knows a guy whose entire plantation had to shut down because someone thought it couldn't possibly be brain fungus and boom, a year later the humans were keeling over left and right and he didn't have the budget to replace them all. Especially if you're a serious breeding operation that's going to be selling all over the continent, do NOT fuck around when it comes to a possible brain fungus outbreak.

Unicorn brain fungus. Wow. The more you know. Apart from susceptibility to brain fungus, though, she hears Humans Are Not Unicorns! What's the difference, O fascinatingly horrid book author.

Humans are not unicorns! Humans are not horses! Humans are not goats or cats or camels! Humans are not songbirds or decorative plants!

Humans can speak and understand language; humans can think. This is hugely important to keep in mind when breeding humans, because it means that the relationship between a human's bloodlines and their behaviour is infinitely more complicated than that of a simple animal. You can't just breed humans for talent at calligraphy the way you can breed dogs for talent at tracking or fetching or herding, or breed horses for racing or pulling loads.

(There's a four-page digression here about the specifics of the author's particular horse breeding operation and lessons the author has learned therefrom, and the edges of the pages are noticeably worn compared to the rest of the book's fairly crisp state.)

Anyway, when it comes to humans, you sometimes need to put a lot of work into understanding why a certain human is good at a certain thing before you start trying to enhance it in the next generation. Is your fighter good at fighting for physical reasons or psychological ones? Is your laborer very strong because they come from a strong bloodline, or because they've been fed well and worked hard all their life? Is your scribe quick with numbers because of natural cleverness or because they have an abacus? Test these things, don't just assume! Look at the human's close relatives and see if they have similar talents! Try training all your scribes with the abacus and then see who the best one is! Also, stop having your slaves do your accounting, you lazy degenerate. This is why the modern world is falling apart. Nobody writes their own correspondence or keeps their own books anymore. Why, in the author's day...

(There's a two-page digression about how the author feels that young elves these days are lazy, undisciplined, badly educated, and should sober up and quit partying all the time. It's sort of weirdly pointed but whatever sociopolitical subtext the author intends to convey is not presented with sufficient explanation for May to understand it.)

Okay. What's the cautionary note? After that she will move on to the dragon book.

The cautionary note is another emphatic warning about unicorn brain fungus followed by a chapter going point by point in exhaustive detail about why the author thinks it is bad practice to have sex with your humans. The most major consideration against is of course the risk of creating a hybrid, but the author also thinks that it's a bad idea for other reasons, like that it can lead to favoritism and discipline issues, or that it's a failing of these degenerate modern times something something pointed yet impenetrable sociopolitical subtext. Anyway don't do it.

Moving right along: dragon book! This one is written in a less familiar dialect, and some of the phrasings can be hard to puzzle out. Sort of comparable to trying to read Shakespeare unaided. It seems to be describing historical encounters with dragons, but in a weirdly repetitive way, almost like it's presenting several different retellings of the same story in parallel. Consistent among all the accounts is that dragons are huge, powerful, and mad about elves trying to move into the desert. Other than that, details vary, with some perspectives talking about them like they're sneaky trickster spirits while others depict them almost as mindless forces of nature, winged hurricanes that destroy everything in their path.

How... big... are dragons around here.

That's wildly unclear from the vague and contradictory accounts in this book!

Well, Imra didn't laugh at her being a ridiculously midgety dragon or anything. Where is he anyway, this is taking a while.

She has time to puzzle through about another half a chapter's worth of dragon-related legends and rumours before Imra says All right, I'm back! and then walks in the door.

"Sorry to keep you waiting, it took longer than I expected to find the secret plans. I realized as soon as I actually looked at the old wine cellar that I couldn't possibly be the first person to think of digging a hidden room there, and it turns out I'm absolutely right about that, so we're going to have to be a bit careful not to run into the other one. I think we'll do fine, though."

"What's in the other hidden room?"

"The plans didn't say. Could've been a bolthole in case the palace gets overrun, could've been contraband storage, could've been where one of my noble ancestors kept their embarrassing collection of bad poetry..."

"Oh, for some reason I was imagining you discovered another secret room existed and immediately attempted to enter it."

"I might have, but I didn't want to take the time while you were waiting for me! We can look at it together if you like."

"Sounds fun. I read some of the creepy human breeding book while you were gone, how worried should I be about unicorn brain fungus?"

"There hasn't been an outbreak in centuries. I think you're safe."

"Oh good. It seemed to be very much weighing on the author's mind. - Should I be wearing some other sort of clothes for going about the place? I mean, I like my clothes fine but I've been in them longer than usual and don't want to be conspicuous on the way down the stairs."

"Right, yes, I thought of that earlier and then forgot, one moment—"

He looks her over, concentrates, and then hands her a stack of fabric. "I can step out while you get changed. Let me know if anything doesn't fit, I'm usually good at guessing sizes but nobody's perfect."

"Thanks."

How hard is it to figure out these articles of clothing?

Not that hard. There's a shirt-like thing and a pants-like thing and a set of weirdly long undershorts and a pair of slippers. None of it is too small and the things that are big are plausibly intended that way.

Then presently May will emerge in the slippers with her Earth clothes in one hand and her shoes in the other.

Imra is sheepishly holding a large canvas sack. "I forgot your bag's really weird too, I can put an illusion over it if you want or you could just stuff it in here to disguise it."

Stuff stuff. "I should have remembered, they were confused about zippers."

"Believably pretending to be something you're not is really hard, it turns out! Anyway, this way to the wine cellar."

May follows along, sack in hand, looking around only a little nervously for third party inspection.

Third parties definitely notice Imra but don't seem especially curious about who's following him. He leads her along a somewhat circuitous route down through several levels of the castle and into a clean, dry underground storage area full of stacked barrels. Past the barrels, a small unobtrusive door leads to the promised maze: a twisty little passage lined wall-to-wall with wine racks, leading into yet more twisty little passages. The wine racks are fastened to the walls very securely, and seem to be about 60-80% full of bottled wine.

Imra has a quick sketch of the wine cellar's floor plan in his hand by this point and is consulting it as he walks. On paper you can sort of see how someone had a vision for a way to get a cellar room with a really absurd amount of surface area, and wasn't thinking about inconsequential details like how you would ever hope to navigate it afterwards.

"Here," he says, the first time they come to a real live corner that doesn't secretly have more wine cellar behind it. "Let me see..." He squints at a bit of illegible marginalia, then stands up on tiptoe and grabs the protruding end of a wine rack support strut. Pulling on it causes a folding crank handle to slide out, and as he turns the crank, the wine rack to his left goes 'click' and starts slowly receding, taking its whole section of wall with it. "Oof, that's stiff. All right, since you asked, let's see what's in this secret room."

It takes the wine rack and attached wall section a solid minute or so to slide backward and rotate out of the way so they can enter the room. By the end of it, Imra is looking noticeably tired.

The room beyond is small and cramped, and where the wine cellar is lined on all available surfaces with wine racks, this one is lined on all available surfaces with shelves, and the shelves are covered in an assortment of paper—some loose, some folded, some rolled into scrolls. In the middle of the room there is a lamp and a writing desk.

"Uh...?"

He proceeds cautiously into the room, picks up a folded letter with a cracked wax seal, and reads. "'My Dearest, I thought of you today while hunting rabbits...' um. I'm not sure I want to read this out loud, actually."

"Somebody's weird love letter cellar! Gosh."

"Apparently!" He's skimming the rest of the letter. "...ah, I think I've figured out why this person built a love letter cellar. He just mentioned his wife. So... an entire secret cellar behind the obnoxious wine maze, just to hide an affair," he glances around the room, "which I have to imagine was conducted mostly on paper because this is a lot of paper... I guess either conducted mostly on paper or conducted for a really, really long time. Anyway, I was slightly hoping we might be able to repurpose the existing secret room but I don't think there's enough... room... in here... even if we took out all the love letters... and also I think the door might be too heavy for you to move, I was having trouble hauling on that crank and elves are stronger than humans."

"I am not stronger than a human - unless I'm scaly and even then the effect is pretty modest. Where's the site for the new secret room?"

He carefully puts back the letter he was reading, steps out, waits for May to follow, and starts cranking the door shut.

"A different corner of the maze, I found one where one of the wine racks is narrower than the rest and I think it'll make for a hidden door that's lighter and easier to move. I'm also planning to have it take rather less of the wall along with it."

"Are you going to conjure up the hidden door?"

"Yes, most likely. It'll be hard to build it otherwise."

"Cool. How do we get through the wall without the ceiling caving in on us or something?"

"I was planning on using telekinesis, at least to start. And I can use illusions for temporary supports."

"Cool. Let me know when it's safe to start trying out my earth moving spell."