-- What the fuck is this, there's no reason the Princess's half-complete 'Find Familiar' spell-item-thing should be trying to fire, but it is and she's in the laboratory, what fucking timing --

Well, she says half complete, but really all it was actually missing was something on the ...other ...end...

Fuck, that could be bad - but the Princess, despite her many faults, wasn't that much of an idiot - fuck -

Stabilize it now and figure out what in the Nether-damned fuck this even is once things aren't maybe possibly going to explode --

She grabs hold of her magic and makes something λ, a cascade of well-ordered void constraining the chaos-given-purpose of her predecessor's magic.  That they are complementary elements does not make this any easier, though Void has a type advantage against Chaos - Light similarly gives rise to Order that might subvert the containment!

...It doesn't explode.

From Aeslin's perspective, this manifests as something pulling, sharp but not harsh, even as the black-and-silver become strange and impossible colors - and then, a feeling like being drunk (as if a glass of water), as a universe asserts it surrounds her once more and a shell of magical containment lays itself down around her. 

Whoever's doing it seems inordinately concerned about explosions - there's something terribly infinite about the darkness she can almost make out behind the ineffably-purplish barrier sphere she's materialized within, as if the world is nothing but an infinitesimal possibility - one chance, out of infinities.  And one out of infinity...Well.  It may as well be zero, for all the infinity cares.

Then, the empty void... peels away, along some stranger axis, and the young woman who presumably called up that primal force as a firedamp buries her face in her hands.

"...Why is this my life.  One isekai scenario wasn't enough?  I have two of them?  Why..."

...Well.  She hopes this is just one of those.  It should be.  The λrules of the λeffect she wrapped around the seemingly-not-exploding artifact shouldn't have permitted something particularly hostile to existence passage, to say nothing of the chaotic attractor warping the world towards "things that complement Alicia's existence" left from the princess's work.  Still, the question is how that part resolved, and she doesn't know.

Aeslin is surprised to see a world around her.  Is this not a pocket dimension at all?  Is it an instant-travel spell that yanked her into some far part of the world?  There're some stories of those from the Days of Wonder, but she didn't think they were real...

Well, if so, she's not sure whether it's better or worse than being trapped in a pocket dimension until someone can get her out.  It probably depends on where they dropped her.

At least it'll be more fun than being trapped in a pocket dimension.

She looks around, noting the un-Suinel-like architecture of the room and clothes on the mage in front of her.  She's never been out of Suinel before, except for the war - she never took the time.

She also waves her wand - without casting anything - to feel for leylines.

With that, it's maybe ten seconds before she answers the strange mage "- Two strange arrivals?  Did someone else trigger the spell before me?  I hope they didn't hurt anyone?"  And then she quickly adds "- oh, and where are we?"

She's about to add her name and rank in the Royal Research Mages, but thinks better of it just in case this mage is an ally of the Crystal Mountains.

"No, that story is yet stranger still.  This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time this has ever occurred.  ...There was a spell on your end that triggered this?  Great.  Great, okay, excuse me, I need to just...

"Wait, shit, you might need to go back --

"...Oh, blast.  Can we even make that happen?  The effect being chaos magic on my end does not bode well and there just isn't enough passive recording here to reconstruct a trace..."

"No, I've never seen anything like that spell before!  Unless you count the pocket dimensions - I've seen two of them - but we haven't been able to make any of them since the Days of Wonder!  I had some recording, of course, but that was from outside - and I don't think they could even tell what was this spell versus what was all the other spells, and I suppose I can't really be totally sure myself; for all I know the quasi-ritual-binding was a necessary part even though I was pretty sure I unraveled that -"

Her train of thought suddenly having arrived at an idea that's both specific, worrisome enough to be worth quickly checking, and able to be quickly checked, she casts her first spell in this world:  a spell to inspect her own body for magic on it.

(On it, not around it - she's got a lot of wards around her, plus the passive shields woven in her hair, plus the spare wands sewn into her blouse.  She came to war prepared.)

It comes back clean.  As she expected, but worth checking.

"...Yeeeeah, you're definitely not from around here.  Spatial expansion isn't that common, but it's understood.  Not to mention portals.  Which are even more -- Hold on.

"Ritual binding?  That's - oh dear - if you don't mind I'd like to check and make sure that you aren't -- if you don't trust me that far that's fine, I'm assuming you have some idea of how to check yourself - was that what that was?"

Her magic responds, precisely as she envisions it.  It may not be the traditional Azerosan paradigm, but it's sufficiently Orderly that it will work.

"Yes, they didn't get any on me, and I'm not totally sure that's even what they were trying; I couldn't really take the time to check -"

She suddenly realizes the first thing the other mage meant.

"Wait, you actually know how to make pocket dimensions!?"

"I mean, not off the top of my head, it's not quite as simple as it looks once you know spacetime is a Thing you can Do Stuff To, but yes?  Yes."

"I didn't think anyone knew how to do that anymore???  Not since the Days of Wonder???  Queen Elethy herself doesn't have the least idea - stars above, how did you find it --

"-- and where are we?"

"...You're in the research laboratory of Princess Alicia Thorn, of the Kingdom of Villarosa, on what is probably an entire other planet than wherever you came from to say nothing of the possibility - the likelihood, even - that you aren't in your home universe.  ...Ah, and in the interests of clarity, yes, I'm the Princess.  Please don't mind that.  I try not to, at least when it comes to magic."

"So, speaking of, I'm not actually sure that were I deposited into your universe that the same methods would work, but I can explain, I suppose.

"It's oddly akin to glassblowing.  Making a spatial pocket, that is.  There's a certain - way you approach it - you have to be careful with the boundaries - and then if you're talking about pocket dimensions in the sense of isolated planes you have a whole 'nother kettle of fish involved in getting them out of this one - but...it's well-understood, around here.  Has been for a while.  It's extended from stasis fields, if you squint."

"I didn't know there were other universes --"

She feels utterly lost and abandoned far from home for a moment, before remembering that was just speculation.  Her magic works here; her body's holding together, the enemy mages' spell got her here - the evidence she has so far, at least, points to her still being in the same universe.  Unless Alicia has other evidence.

"But making spatial pockets like that sounds - plausible but so complicated!  Blowing space like glass - you'd need to keep calculating how the flow of magic changes through the space you're changing, and I can see how that might get pocket dimensions, but I'd need to think more about how to actually calculate it accurately enough!  Or maybe train your intuition, but that sounds like something that'd need to be much more precise than even the best-trained intuition... at least for humans like me; I wouldn't be surprised if it's different for some Fay if not Elves?  Oh, you are human, right?"

(She isn't minding the "Princess" part at all, but she hasn't remembered to even mention that.  She's used to working with Queen Elethy, and her being a queen barely even matters to Aeslin compared to her being the last Elf alive.)

"Geberally that's what building support structures into your spell design is for.  You can just do math on magic.  At least, here, I don't know what your world's like on that front."

"...As for 'whether I'm human'...

"That's a more complicated question than you might think.  Because obviously biologically I'm human in all the ways that matter.  But...mmm...  There's a thing that happens, sometimes, when the conditions arise for new souls. Sometimes when that new soul coalesces, it comes with a deeper connection to the formless chaos that is at the root of existence, for all that that itself arose from another interaction of the primal forces in turn.  And in that sense, I'm capable of feats no human should be - it's a weight upon the fabric of the universe, and I can somewhat control which way it pulls.  And if that's what Fay do, then I suppose I'm not unakin to them as much as I'm still just...human, underneath it all.

"...Elves and fae, insofar as fae exist as a coherent category, which I don't necessarily believe is a thing -" She certainly didn't design them - "are not actually more or less prone to being like me than anyone else is.  I just want to note that.  There's a great diversity of form around here, and that's a bit of a language collision."

"'Controlling how the fabric of the universe pulls'... That could be one way to describe what Fay do?  If by 'fabric of the universe' you mean the flow of magic itself?  But that's not how any of us - well, almost any of us -" (there was that one weird scholar she met that once) "- would describe it - and personally I think it's more likely that magic flows from the planet not the universe - and anyway Elves are all like that with the flow of magic where I'm from so you're probably talking about something totally different...

"... And if you have solid reasons to believe anything about conditions for new souls, it sounds like your magic is way ahead of ours there!"

"Oh, don't take my words as being about the state of knowledge - I'm cheating - but yes, we do have something of an idea of how souls happen."

"...That said, I know for a fact that the magic of this universe is not generated by the planet, unless you squint really hard at spirit and spirits - there might be a spirit-of-the-planet but she's too big to pay attention to us!  Magic is the process of invoking one of the six - fundamental forces, prime concepts, take your pick they're big, ineffable, and important - and using their nature to fit your will.  And insofar as magic, and indeed the universe we're in, comes from anything, at least around here, it's all from the -"

She suddenly realizes that while she knows, intimately, the process by which stuff Exists, she doesn't quite have the vocabulary to describe it.  ...Fuck it, she'll have to improvise.

"The excitation of probability, I suppose.  I had to make that up, but...

"This universe, hell, this multiverse, sits in a fundamentally uncollapsible superposition between a source of a single overwhelming existence that outcompetes all others, and infinite infinitesimals that have no weight yet paradoxically exist.  Heavy on the paradox, because they also, y'know, don't exist, because they're probability zero, but I digress.

"It is from the refraction of the Light into the infinite unpossibility of the Void, that anything resembling normal existence happens - but even the impossible things happen in the Twisting Nether, which is...Where you either ended up, or got pulled through.  I think 'got pulled through' is more likely, because if it you had ended up there first this thing should have already worked based on that same infinite unpossibility thing - but based on it taking this long it needed something with more weight than just the Principle of Explosion.  At least, if the universe didn't start existing last Tuesday, which I really can't disprove given my information..."

She trails off, into the dread existential question of whether this universe was just now made.  She...really doesn't know.  Shit.

"...Moving on.  Magic where you're from...Seems to be quite different from magic here.  Because it is fundamentally true of this universe that it arose from its magic.  Magic here isn't just something bolted on to a material physics.  Magic created material physics."

There're so many things in there Aeslin doesn't know what to respond to first!

Her existential lostness at having a reason to think she's in a whole new universe is almost outcompeted by all these fascinating questions!

"Yes - where I'm from magic is something different from physics as close as we can tell - magic comes from the stars, and we can't exactly get there to look at them --  But how is my body even existing here without physics!? -"

She throws up her hands, which are still hands, her shock warring with her curiosity warring with her disbelief.

"Did my soul suddenly create a whole new body or something!?"

"It's magic, it don't gotta explain shit, to make a reference only people on the other side of the fourth wall - and me, I guess - will get.  But more seriously...Yeah, that's probably basically what happened?  With whatever happened to you to begin with doing who-knows-what, and then having to pull you up through the Twisting Nether - I wouldn't be surprised if a new body just sort of happening based on your self-image wasn't the path of least resistance, magically speaking.  Both from the 'sieving order from chaos' nature of the entire axis of spellwork that was actually powering the thing, and also because Light magic just sort of does that."

"Well.  It's all a function of oneness, is Light magic.  And given that my predecessor was really quite capable of stubborning that oneness into doing what she wanted, even if she wasn't really a healer, I think it's - something that would happen.  The spell was - maybe meant to summon, like, a familiar spirit, or a companion animal - but I think she missed something, in the design.  Because if she'd done it right, this would not have happened!  She got the focus backwards, too, I think.  The spell felt like - using Light to search - which is...not how it does things - I mean, every magic can do most things but they're better at some depending on the approaches...

"...Really," and here she seems to be fully taken by a nerdsnipe, "it needed just a hint of void to it.  To - leaven the chaos that would, despite the spellwork, twist out of the light's grip before the - beacon - could draw it in, with stable possibility.  ...Damn.  I guess that means it's my fault you're here, that's one of the forces I work with."

"Well, I'd rather be here than where I thought I was going to be," she immediately replies to that last statement.

And really, being a friend to magically-prodigious royalty is half of what she's been doing, aside from magic itself.

"You keep saying things that almost make sense, that rhyme with the magic I'm used to!  Order from chaos - yes, that's how stars bring forth light brings forth life.  Self-image being the path of least resistance - yes, that's one major theory of how souls interact with bodies in the first place!  But you're not using them in the right way, which means -

"- Well, it could mean you've got a totally different magical tradition from ours which has gotten into whole new aspects of the same fundamental magical laws and we can maybe both bring each other to new heights!  Or maybe not, if we've lost too much in the Last Elven War in the first place, but it'd still be great for us!

"Or it could mean something totally different and your magic is totally different from mine!  Especially if I really am in a new universe!  Do you have any ways to tell if I'm using your magic!?"