Gokigenyou Academy of Purity welcomes you back to its grounds.

Her mapping efforts have had a subtle effect on how she interacted with the world. Finding new things meant work now: Labeling, taking notes, stealing maps, assembling everything, letting the map encroach on living space... There was a freedom to just go out and explore that was lost when she felt obligated to her map monster.

But she felt good when she saw her progress too! Cartography would really help here. She thought maybe she could make use of computers, but one look at the keyboard told her that wasn't happening. She had been making use of her clairvoyance to spy on classes as they were happening to try to pick up on the language, but keeping up the motivation for that had been hard. It helped that she was starting to pick up words more often, and tried to make a game out of interpreting what was being said, but it still got really boring.

She needed to find a new portal, she was supposed to be a multiversal traveler dammit!

She teleported several times in quick succession.

There's a distant sense of something not quite exactly like a portal. It has some of the essence of Earth and Rockhome to it, and some of the essence of Lesbos, and a handful of other aspects that are less familiar and hard to get a read on at this distance.

Also, it's moving fairly rapidly, not directly toward her but definitely getting closer over time.

"That's new!" She tries to make sense of the feelings she's picking up from it.

"What the heck am I sensing here?" Why was it moving? Portals didn't move. She tries to teleport to it, preempting its movement so that she can get ahead of it. A weird feeling of dread suffuses her as she focuses, but she doesn't really see what there is to be afraid of. She jumps.

The source of the effect turns out to be a girl on a bicycle.

This bicycle was not meant to take passengers, certainly not so abruptly.

One girl on a bicycle becomes two girls on a bicycle becomes two girls off a bicycle in short order.

"Augh!" the stranger exclaims.

"Wagh!" She screams as her world becomes one of pain, confusion, tangled limbs and bicycle parts jabbing her ribs.

The bicycle ends up on top of both of them when they roll to a halt; the stranger starts to push it away, then stops when she observes that there's another girl there.

"—are you okay? Where did you come from??" she says, baffled, in perfectly ordinary English.

Up close, the unfamiliar parts of her aura are clearer. There's a sense of flat calm quiet stillness, lonely and eerie; a sense of sandy fields of metal flowers under a gentle faceted sun; and a sense of a warm, humid forest whose ground is filled with bones.

"From your dreams baaaby..." She mumbles, vaguely concussed. She jolts upright. "Wait, you speak English!"

The blonde girl's aura is simpler, Bevin and Earth intermingle within her.

The sudden movement jars the bicycle; the stranger winces, then heaves it off of both of them. The bicycle itself seems none the worse for the encounter. The stranger is doing pretty well too; her wine-red motorcycle leathers are slightly scuffed at the knee, where they protected her from what would've been a nasty scrape otherwise.

"Y...es," she says. "Yes I do. You're, um—you're not local, then?" She blinks a few times. "No, you can't be—you're definitely another Conduit."

Conduit, what is she... "Is that what we're called?" She picks herself up, the blonde girl isn't doing as good, its clear she's gotten a bad scrape from her fall, she hisses as she wipes the filth and gravel from her hands. The blonde girl may not be a local, but she definitely dresses like one. This one is wearing loose, poofy socks, with black shoes, a pink skirt, a tight white shirt with a pastel heart on it, and a light pink bolero jacket. She blinks at the stranger. "Aw man, where'd you find that outfit! That looks sick!"

"Oh, um, I made it," she says, ducking her head shyly. "One of my worlds is a forest and you can get this leathery bark by asking the trees for it very politely... I don't really have another source of clothing so all my stuff is made out of it."

"That sounds amazing! I've had to steal all of my clothes." She pats herself off. "I'm really sorry I teleported into you like that, I just teleported into the center of the disturbance I felt without looking first. It turns out that when a jump is filling you with a nameless dread before you do so, you should probably abort!"

"...I will keep that in mind if I ever learn to teleport. Is that a power you picked up from a world? Which one?"

"I..." She blinks. "You can't do that?" She thinks. "I'm actually not sure. Frankly I'm a little unsure of where some of my powers come from. Some of it is from Lesbos, uh, I mean this world. I got some lightning manipulation and parkour from a world that was filled with golem people and... I got a bunch of purple fire stuff from a world that is very dark and rainy." She crosses her arms. "Teleportation doesn't feel like its from any of them, though."

"I think this world is called the Academy," she says, trying not to laugh. "I don't recognize either of those descriptions but it's been a while since I read through a list of all the worlds I've heard of... I have the power that lets my library pick up books published by other Conduits, it's very useful."

She opens her mouth, then closes it. She's at a loss for which of those threads to pick at first. Library? Books published by Conduits? List of worlds?! Was she supposed to know that a library power was something she could get? She puts a hand on her forehead. "Wait, wait, can we slow down? I'm sorry, this is a lot. We should absolutely be friends and hang out and compare notes! But I literally just crashed into you and now my world is getting turned upside down." She smiles awkwardly.

"...reasonable," she says. "At least there aren't dinosaurs. Last time I met another Conduit I had to jump in his car to make a quick getaway because he was being chased by a T-rex."

"I didn't know dinosaurs were an option!" She grins. "I don't know how, but I'm going to ride one." She looks around. "Let's sit down somewhere?"

"Somewhere other than the ground? Yes. Good plan." She gets up and collects her bicycle, then turns back the way she came. "I passed a nice park a little bit ago. Well, there are always nice parks. But I happen to know where this one is."

"Oh god, tell me about it. I've spent the last month trying to map this damnable place out, and let me tell you, the nice parks are everywhere. Did you know that every body of water with beaches is a lake with coasts just distant enough that you can't see the other side from the ground? Literally every one I've seen." She follows the stranger.

"You know, I haven't seen that many beaches so far, but somehow I believe you completely. It sounds like the sort of thing this place would do. I've been trying to make a map too, but mostly only near my bridge to Arbor—that's the nice forest—well, I say 'nice', it wants you to turn into a tree but is overall very nice about it—I am not succeeding at having a reasonable conversation."

With that, they're already at the park. It's every bit as picturesque as all the other parks in the Academy, and has a bench close by. The stranger in the red leather outfit leans her bike against the side of the bench and sits down.

She flops down. "Ah, yeah." She sighs. "I do like having easy access to nice parks. But this place is so uncanny, it took me almost a week to figure out that it wasn't Earth, you called this world the Academy?"

"Yes. I found a book by another Conduit who had explored some worlds and that's what he called it. And, um, the Cozy Cave House is called Bevin. You have one of those, right? I think I can sort of tell..."

"Bevin? What kind of word is Bevin? I've been calling it my Rockhome. But, yeah, I have one, it's currently housing my mapping project, so there's basically no floor space." She has a thought. "Oh! They don't run out of air, do they?"