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Ehail blinks, when she finds the bar instead of her room.
She goes in.
She looks out the window, at the exploding things.
"I don't think this is my planet," she observes to herself, tucking silver hair behind her ear.
nonbird
"It almost certainly isn't!" says a man at a nearby table, looking up from his book.
...He double-takes almost before he's properly seen her in the first place, and then spends some time blinking and squinting.
...He double-takes almost before he's properly seen her in the first place, and then spends some time blinking and squinting.
Ehail tilts her head at him. "...Do I have something on my face?"
nonbird
"Um. No," he says. "Not exactly. Sorry. You're - are you by any chance - um, I can't help noticing - your magic is in a state I'd describe as 'very stably just barely not dead'?"
"I... didn't know that was the sort of thing that anyone would be able to see."
nonbird
"I'm the sort of anyone who sees that sort of thing," he says. "That looks really uncomfortable."
"Oh, it doesn't hurt once we're twenty or so," she murmurs.
"It's only a side effect," demurs Ehail.
nonbird
"It's not a good side effect," he says, inarguably. "It is the opposite of one of those."
"Well. I know," she says. "I'm just not sure how you can see it. Since the - magic thing - doesn't hurt directly."
nonbird
"I'm not sure I'm seeing exactly the same thing you're talking about," he says. "The way that it looks uncomfortable doesn't exactly seem to hurt... it's just that it almost seems like your magic doesn't like itself very much. Or something."
"Oh. That." She looks away.
She shrugs. "You're right. It doesn't."
"Well, I would fix it, if I knew how, but I haven't gotten anywhere so far."
nonbird
"I would also fix it, if I could fix things," he says. "Maybe I will go talk to the shady wish-mongerers."
"...What?"
nonbird
"Oh. Um, in my world there are some people who have access to magic coins that grant wishes, and I find them vaguely intimidating and don't like to have anything to do with them if I can help it. But they really want me to do magic-seeing for them, so I could probably convince them to produce some wishcoins for you to try on your... problem."
"There are a lot of us."
nonbird
"I would like to find out if wishes will work," he says. "Quantity is the next problem to solve after that."
"I wouldn't be first in line," says Ehail. "If it couldn't be everybody."
nonbird
"You might end up being first in line just because you happen to be the one who is here," he says. "I don't know, I am probably not thinking this through as well as I could be. Um, this is a magic bar that brings people in from all different universes, by the way."
"Oh," says Ehail.
She sits down. "Does... that mean it would be hard to bring help from your world to the baby ones, or to bring the baby ones safely here - or, no, they can't come here, what if there were a dragon - but it means that I would be the test case for some reason?"
She sits down. "Does... that mean it would be hard to bring help from your world to the baby ones, or to bring the baby ones safely here - or, no, they can't come here, what if there were a dragon - but it means that I would be the test case for some reason?"
nonbird
"I'm not sure. A lot of this depends on Chris. She is the shady wish-mongerer that I know," he explains. "She might not want me hauling a lot of coins around, in which case I would have to bring one of you to my world to try it, and then it would make the most sense for it to be you because you're already here and - what about what if there were a dragon?"