“... yes.”

It takes a step forwards.

It's bigger than it was earlier.

“What do you want.”

Chasing them, apparently!

"Bina are your dreams normally like this," Lash asks as the not-skeleton dog starts shuffling forward.

"To be honest they're usually worse."

If they have enough time for witty dialogue, he has enough time to put a force pearl - or two, make it three - in the path of the not-dog!

He doesn’t expect this maneuver to buy them more than a few seconds, but those few seconds can be spent grabbing Bina’s hand and RUNNING THE FUCK AWAY.

(Can’t turn into a bird because he can’t get too far away from them, can’t turn them into birds with shapechanging pearls because he’d have to explain how to use them, because he never actually explained the ‘I can also turn other people into animals, given certain parameters’ thing, because he never actually sat down for five minutes and thought about how to explain his capacity set without leaving gaps -)

The dog switches from slowly creeping forward to sprinting at them once he moves.

Bina drags them down, into a hole, and they're falling - 

And they're in her grandmother's apartment again. Grandmother is wrapping a red scarf around little Bina's neck - 

Older Bina takes the scarf off her neck, flings it across a gap in reality - 

And swings them all across.

Things are still, for now - they're on an empty washed out street, no animals or people or anything moving. There's a sort of not-light permeating everything.

That whole process was intensely disorienting and he’s not really sure what to make of it. 

"... are you two okay?"

"Yeah. I think. Hopefully." She closes her eyes, and - "I can't remember what originally happened. In that memory. So. Maybe not so good."

"I. Think I'm fine?"

"Great. I'm at a tepid 'not in immediate danger of dying'. 

For future reference, I can also turn other people into birds. I hand you a pearl, you break it, you turn into a bird, you turn back after it runs out of charge or at will. I don't have any pearls with more than a few minutes charge, but they'll still turn you into birds for that time. You probably want some. In retrospect I should've mentioned them earlier, but I didn't expect the dramatic chase scene."

" - Yeah that could've been useful. Is there anything else? Does your magic do a bunch of discrete stuff like that?"

“The pearls are the same basic thing as the shapeshifting and I’m - unused to a cultural context where people don’t know they’re the same thing. No other capabilities of the same scale that I haven’t already demonstrated come to mind. I can do any medium-sized thing that I think of, with generic spellcasting, but I can only do that a limited number of times a day, it takes a while, and it doesn’t do lastingly magical effects on living things; if you want medium-sized magic done, ask. I would’ve remembered to mention it eventually, but the dream quest seemed time urgent and unlikely to require turning into a bird.”

(He plucks a handful of shimmery, irridescent pearls out of thin air, and hands Bina and Lasha three, each.)

She'll take them.

"There's a lot of small ways magic can be leveraged, especially with different systems working together - mage hand, a common type of really basic spell, is incredibly useful. You can tear a rift in reality combining some relatively common - if expensive - magic items. I know someone who defeated a powerful dracolich in part by slowly blessing a tremendous amount of holy water, putting it into an extradimensional space, and then opening the space over the dracolich's head. A lot of spells, especially those that give auras, get far more useful with flight."

“I have no idea what most of those things are, and I doubt that they’re immediately relevant. Not from around here.

Is our plan for finding the old man the same, now, or are we trying something else?”

"We need to get into his memory. I think. I'm not used to magic this - metaphorical. But my memories of him might be a workable bridge, which means I need to narrow in on the laundromat. Which the dog might be hanging around."

“To the laundromat, then.”

"Yeah." She rubs her forehead. "I think the memories need a link between them, so we might have to jump through more - angling for my apartment's probably the best way to get to the laundromat... Hm. Lash's here, so I can hook from her to leaving to going to this city..."

She nods, decisively, and then leads them through a door, onto a crowded train where very slightly younger Bina appears to be having a panic attack, through there to the apartment (there's luggage by the door and someone's throwing up in the bathroom), then down the stairs, and they're outside the laundromat.

("I didn't know - " Lash says, quietly, while they're passing through the panic scene.)

("Yeah. Didn't want you to," Bina responds, just as quietly.)

She’s honestly almost suspiciously good at navigating, here, although he’s not sure what to be suspicious of -

(He manages to hear that little exchange. He decides that acting on it in any way would be invasive, and accordingly refrains from comment.)

(She'd argue they're in her brain, knowing which memories connect to which is pretty easy, but, yeah, the dream itself is suspiciously easy to navigate.)

"I haven't been here much," she says, as they enter -

And the laundromat's damaged. There's a jagged pulsing hole in the floor, black tarry goo over several surfaces, static oozing from the interior doors.

"...This is not my memory."

“I’m unsurprised.”

She sidles around the hole, looking down into it - 

Darkness, as far as she can see, except for how it writhes - 

She looks away.

Shaitiren looks in.

He quietly resolves to never, ever go on any more ridiculous dream quests again what the fuck.

“... should I take your sudden uncertainty as a cue to start slinging spells,” he asks, conversationally, “or do you have other ideas?”