When Ruwien and Federation negotiations opened up enough that they started allowing emigration- carefully, ever so carefully- they weren’t particularly expecting noble mages to emigrate, given how they were nearly at the top of the totem pole.

One of them does. One of them did. One of them, even, is here right now, watching the city sparkle. 

He was expecting it to be a compromise, being in a place more dense and less pretty than Ruwien cities ever were. He wasn’t expecting to find it ever so instantly moving- to feel a sudden, unshakable sense that this was reality, that this was what happened when you couldn’t just conjure up whatever you’d like, that this was the way the world really worked- to feel like he’d walked on carefully managed pavement, all of his life, and only now discovered the roots that lurked beneath it.

He’d considered selling his services as a spellcaster, to acquire spending cash, but the idea had felt- ugly and horrible and inauthentic. Like slipping into old, ratty, shit-encrusted shoes that you’d long discarded, instead of the boots you’d spent so much to buy. Just because they were more comfortable. Just because it would be easy.

He’ll start selling a trickle of shen pearls, maybe, once he’s already become established as a dancer.

And so he’s in a little hostel, dedicated to recent immigrants, browsing this culture’s equivalent of a classified section, looking for anyone advertising a need for entertainment.

There's a bar that does live bands, a coffee shop that hosts events every ten days (poetry readings are next, then a show of some kind), a theater group looking for extras, a dinner-and-a-show place looking for waitstaff who can maybe eventually be upgraded to performers, a painter who wants exotic models, an artsy cafe that offers live dance shows as a visual alternative to music (which dancers will be asked to perform without; the cafe proper remains silent). There's more he's less likely to be interested in - orchestra understudies, chorus members, voices for animations, graphic artists, a fashion designer looking for an assistant...

He is tentatively okay with dancing in silence, and mildly interested in working temporarily as waitstaff, and vaguely interested in the experience of being painted. Do any of those three things have listed times for when he ought to show up, or do they seem to be operating on an ‘I guess you can come by whenever, at such and such address’ model, or is it a mix?

The painter has a set time - roughly evening-ish, in the third hour of the fourth mark (the twenty hour Veshiri day being split into five marks of four hours each, measuring from midnight as the first hour of the first mark) - and address, apparently her studio, but appointments can be made outside that time, using the following mailing address.

The dinner and a show place has a range of hours (the entirety of the third and fourth marks), a location, and directions for which door to enter through.

The cafe is similar, though it also notes that anyone who needs accommodations other than translation magic can contact them ahead of time. The hours for them are only the third mark. 

He has no idea how to use their mailing system. He supposes that he’ll eventually figure it out.

He quietly turns into a soft, brightly colored little bird, and nestles into his suddenly much more expansive set of blankets, and goes to sleep.

At the beginning of the third mark, on the following day, he appears at the artsy cafe.

The cafe is located around the middle of one of the slimmer towers, in a corner off the main pathway. The storefront is decorated with colored glass tiles arranged in abstract, flowing patterns, primarily green with flickers of other colors. A sign in the window proclaims "Welcome to the Hidden Garden!" The words are fairly plain, though inked images of flowers surround them. A sign on the door reads "No noise permitted" in several common languages, and has what's probably the symbol for noise (which appears elsewhere) crossed out.

The instructions had said to enter through the employee entrance, which is smaller and off to the side, and to press a button beside the doorknob to be let in, instead of knocking.

They’re certainly dedicated to the bit. 

He presses the button. 

A small light goes on inside, and someone bustles to the door. They're of indeterminate gender, and one of the many non-natives that throng the city - seven feet tall and willowy, with golden eyes too large for their face, papery skin, no hair, a too-wide mouth, and disproportionately long hands with six fingers each. They step outside of the door, look him up and down, and say, voice soft and scratchy and magically understandable, "Are you lost, or looking for work?"

Shaitiren declines to be insulted by the alien’s choice of phrasing.

“Looking for work. I saw the advertisement, figured I might fit the bill, decided to come on by and see,” he says.

"I'll let you talk to Saleh, then, he does hiring. Talking's allowed in the employee area and office, but just don't scream, okay? Stuff's muffled, but not super much."

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he says, following- huh, he’s tempted to mentally gender the alien as violet, weird- following them inside, presuming that they seem amenable to this plan of action.

They do. The entrance seems to feed into the cafe proper to the right, the kitchens ahead, and a narrow hallway to the left, that runs further into the building with assorted doors on the left. The office is the first one, bearing a small plaque reading 'Management', with a door of light, hollow metal.

The person leading him presses a little button beside the knob, and after a few moments another light flashes. The person nods, says, "That's the signal to enter," in a quiet tone, and opens the door.

The manager looks up - he's almost certainly a local elf, fairly masculine and lithe in shape, with vaguely tan skin and black hair and narrow eyes. He nods to the person leading Shaitiren, who signs something, and then at another nod bows and turns to leave, saying, "Saleh's able to see you," in that same soft tone.

Saleh gestures towards himself, says, "Be welcome inside. Whether the door stays open is your prerogative. You are welcome to sit, or not, at your preference." The chair across from him is worn and old but probably at least moderately comfortable.

It’d be a terrible idea to make a flirtatious or joking innuendo, and he’s not too keen on the idea of sex right now, anyways: he’s still tempted, with an opening that wide.

”Thank you,” he says, instead, closing the door and gracefully sitting down. 

"Lavarie informed me you're responding to one of our classifieds?" Saleh says. His voice is high pitched and smooth, vocals short and crisp.

“I was and am interested in applying for the advertised dancing position, given that I am very, very good, don’t substantially mind the stated working requirements, and find myself generally in favor of exposure.”

"We'll want an audition, but we have plenty of openings. Three vigs and two kints an hour, plus tips."

(Vigs, or vigents, are the basic coin apparently - most positions advertise payment in them, and then there's five kints to a vigent. His hostel charges two vigents a night for a dorm room, or six for a private room. The eateries and street food stalls around his hostel tend to cost between one and two kints for a decent meal. The streetcars are ten dys a ride - a dy being a hundredth of a kint.)

“Grand. When would that audition be?”

"We can do it now, if you're ready, or schedule one later. There's a backroom stage available."

“I’d be perfectly happy to do it now,” he says.

He is, as it turns out, almost absurdly good at dancing. There are obvious foreign influences- Ruwien dance styles seems to generally empahasize dramatic crescendos and decrescendos of tempo, displays of acrobatics and balance, and just-barely-not-unnerving displays of flexibility more than Veshiran dance styles, unless those are just personal quirks- but they’re less prominent than might be expected. He acquired most of his knowledge of local styles yesterday, watching a few local buskers, and sketched out the choreography overnight; he looks like he’s practiced with a local tutor for years, and practiced this specific routine for months. Some of what he manages. seems like it’d be straightforwardly impossible for someone working with the average humanoid race’s agility; at one point he manages a quintuple axle twirl. The lack of music sets him back, slightly, but not to the point that anyone else is likely to notice.

If this place has high enough standards that they refrain from taking him, he thinks that he’s going to skip straight over being annoyed and move right on to being impressed.

"We're willing to hire you," he says, voice level. He suspects either the species has self-directed enhancement magic, perfect self control, or some other form of magic. Still, magically enhanced dancing is both allowed and common. "Though I suspect you'll be approached by a talent scout, soon enough, assuming you can maintain that. Even with that display, we can't offer more per hour, but our customers are usually generous tippers."

“Thank you!” says the fellow who totally has self-directed enhancement magic, not having considered this outcome particularly in doubt and satisfied all the same. “I am willing to be hired and generously tipped. Is there anything I need to do to formalize my state thereof?”

"There's paperwork, mostly says who you are, who we are, what conditions you're working under, what we're paying, if you're part of a union - those aren't a big thing here at all, but they are some cities. We'll also get you on the schedule."

And so he fills out mildly tedious paperwork- the section asking his name has a little note saying ‘call me Aiti’, off to the side, circled a few times- and he carefully assures himself that he isn’t accidentally signing away his soul, and he commits his part in the schedule to memory, and he leaves.

The dinner and a show place should still be open; he walks there, leisurely as an unusually satisfied cat, his hands in his pockets. 

It really is a lovely city, hustle and bustle and assorted jostling included.

The dinner and a show place doesn't pay as well (only two vigs an hour), allows tips for waitstaff but expects very little in the way of that, and apparently is chronically understaffed, but their shows are amazingly well choreographed, taking full advantage of each dancer's abilities, and there does seem to be a real chance of working up to a full performer eventually. They have more restrictive hours, and aren't interested in extra staff outside of rush times.

How restrictive, exactly?

They have two hour shifts, with one at lunchtime (in the second and third hour of the third mark), and three at dinnertime (running in total from the third hour of the fourth mark to the end of the fifth mark), and don't offer shifts outside of that. They don't let waitstaff take all four shifts in a day, instead limiting them to three at most - generally the lunch-shift people are an entirely different set from the dinner-shift people.

Mm, the lunchtime one would conflict with his schedule at Hidden Garden, and he mostly only came over anyways on the odd chance that they’d be remarkably appealing in some way... he’ll pass.

He goes and acquires a relatively cheap lunch, and decides to kill the four, five hours until the painter’s available by flying over the city as an unremarkable bird. He switches forms- it feels easier than breathing- and starts flying around, admiring the cityscape.

He isn’t deliberately eavesdropping on people’s conversations, but this particular sort of bird has fairly excellent hearing. He catches snippets.

Most of the conversations are entirely innocuous - a group of adolescents discussing history lessons about the Order of the Black Rose and their war against the gods, someone complaining about scheduling night classes around work, a whole bunch of people navigating bumping into each other - one maybe-girl with her nose in a book causes a lot of "hey watch it!", arguments about the latest play or dys-back novel or manners manual, a party whose music spills out into the air, people selling street food or newspapers or assorted tourist knick-knacks, excited talk about the Worlds Race that's being planned - a second one! With more cars this time! And more worlds have installed roads, opening the track even more, and they said some company out of Amsed invested in recording-orbs specifically designed for races so maybe some places will have footage...

There's a few whispers, too - some girls in carefully fancy dresses planning a raid, someone complaining about being hit by Diamond Divea's gang, some adolescents tittering over a scandal involving a maid who was actually a criminal spy...

... he eavesdrops more intently on the girls in carefully fancy dresses. Maybe they’re part of some sort of weird alien LARP...?

They seem to be more referencing a plan to all burst into a store that hasn't been paying protection fees and steal everything in sight, actually.

That... isn’t... okay? 

He considers reporting them to the authorities. He discards the idea- no real evidence but his say so. What are his resources, here... 

Nobles can’t, quite, manage the flashiness achievable by royal mages. ‘Not flashy’ doesn’t mean ‘impotent’. Thaumaturgy is bad at making actively magical effects stick to people, and to animals, but it can flip mundane binaries pretty trivially- broken to mended, not-a-rabbit to a rabbit, incapable to fluent. 

He lands, in a place where he isn’t about to be noticed- the hustle and bustle help- and flicks out a staff and a wand, and mutters, and gestures.

He flips a binary.

It isn’t an important one. It’s the mystic equivalent of making a bit of spiritual junk DNA spell out a sonnet, really- shouldn’t affect the slightest thing, shouldn’t be the slightest bit noticeable unless another Ruwien happens by and scans them for irregularities.

Thaumaturgy is atrocious at scrying. Thaumaturgy is much less atrocious at scrying when it has a unique identifier to work off of.

He turns back into a bird. He checks the time, and notices that the painter ought to be available, now. He flies.

The painter is indeed available - she's an older Veshiri elf, dressed currently in a smock heavily stained with paint, with her hair twisted into a messy bun behind her. She peers through narrow glasses at Shaitiren, says, "Hm, you'll do, come in, boy."

“I prefer ‘Aiti’ over ‘boy’, and I’ll be glad to get out of the heat,” he says, making a vague gesture at the extent to which he’s currently overdressed- not too terribly, but enough to be less than perfectly comfortable- and obligingly entering the great indoors.

The room is incredibly cluttered, paintings on every wall, several more leaning against it, stacked five deep in some places. Most of the shelves have pieces of pottery, or wooden carvings, or painted figurines. More than a few have books, many of them looking hand bound, overflowing with little notes stuck in them. There's a large cleared space in the middle, and large empty frames with a soft shimmer in them.

Many of the paintings show a tremendous variety of aliens, more than he's seen in the streets, or else alien landscapes, or animals, or plants, or other objects.

"Aiti, then. The screens let me show scenes I've recorded," the woman says, nodding to the frames. "But painting in natural surroundings is better. You have any experience as a model?"

Shaitiren privately wonders if she’s ever randomly assailed a mailman and forced him to sit for portraiture.

“No.”

"I'll want to see how well you follow directions, then, but I do pay. Ten vigs an hour, a minimum of two and a half hours a session, and I'll pay overtime if you can sit longer. The longest sessions I'm interested in are ten hours, for which total pay would be one hundred and thirty seven and a half vigs." She seems to be paying more attention to her studio than him, tapping her finger against her lip. "I'll want to schedule sitting times - not now, too much a chance of being interrupted, and the light's wrong."

“I have no objections forthcoming in response to any of that,” he says, unobjectionably. “I assume that doesn’t mean mean that you don’t want to discuss scheduling times right now- that sentence translated ambiguously. When would work best for you? Or do you have a piece of paper for me to circle times on, or something.”

"Scheduling now is fine. A session now is not. The weekend is best for me. This coming one is booked. The next is not. I am available any time of day or night, except this current hour, or the last and first hour of the night. The first session will be determining what I shall paint."

(It's currently the sixth day of the apparently standard Veshiri ten day week, there being two weeks in a month, and weekends straddling the tenth and first days.)

“That’s fine. So, some time next weekend, to start- any time in particular that would work well? And could you explain more about- basic expectation style stuff, so there aren’t any misunderstandings-”

They work out a reasonable time slot for the first session and the details of it, bid adieu, and Shaitiren flies off.

He finds an out of the way bit of city rooftop- hard to see from the ground, easy to reach as a bird. He plucks up his staff and wand, and conducts appropriate minor instances of ritualism; a circle appears in the air, peering in on the current surroundings of Mysterious Probably-Gang-Connected Girl number one. He manages to squeeze in the communication of sound, although the tweak incidentally renders the scrying sepia.

She's in a very well-appointed parlor, laughing with a few friends. They calm down a bit, then collapse into snickers, then another girl says, "Oh, the look on his face! I know we're not supposed to, but I couldn't resist slipping into a nearby cafe to watch when he came home. He started screaming, burst into the street, red-faced and spitting - I can see why we got so much help, he's a horrid man."

"But you haven't," says his scrying target, "You certainly haven't taken what was nailed down."

The girl sighs. "Alas, I'm no Divea! I considered returning, truly I did, but they've learned to watch for that by now. And some of those cabinets were quite lovely..."

He’d heard people complaining about ‘Diamond Divea’s’ gang, earlier...

He continues watching.

More snickering, and a bit more laughing at past victims' misfortunes, then the girl he's targeting says, lightly, "I wonder if our lovely target will scream and shout like that when the shelves are all bare and we're nowhere to be seen?"

Another girl sighs. "Oh, one could only hope. It's terribly amusing."

They talk a bit more about the raid - but never once mention a location, name, or even gender, and soon enough the conversation drifts on.

How frustratingly competent of them, assuming it isn’t accidental. He closes the scry-

(- and feels the same sort of competitive drive that led him to leave his crapsacharine little world, a cold little tendril wrapping around his every fiber, spelling out ‘if you try to fuck with me, you will lose’- and they weren’t, really, fucking with him, but they were fucking with this city, and that seemed similar enough to provoke the same reaction-)

He considers his resources.

Mind reading is incredibly unethical. But careful, targeted mind reading could be used to answer careful, targeted questions- ‘what’s your full name’ and ‘where are you planning on hitting next’ and ‘what do you know about your boss’, say- without being nearly as generally invasive. It’d be the simplest option, but...

He doesn’t have the oomph for careful, targeted mind reading, or the imprecise kind, even with the dramatic range boost from the spirit markers- at least if he doesn’t want the intrusion to be obvious. He could acquire that oomph, easily enough, by sacrifice, but he doesn’t want to use the most readily available form of sacrifice.

He sighs. He acquires dinner, as a bird- for the novelty, if nothing else- and flies back to the hostel.

There's bugs and seeds and assorted other bird food in the city, but there's also at least one vendor (alien, feathered bright blue with ultraviolet patterns) selling food meant specifically for birds, bird-people, and people with bird-like diets.

The hostel is a bit quieter than normal when he gets back, but not entirely unusually so.

Good for the hostel.

He reads some of a densely written history novel, which he’d packed in advance. He goes to sleep as an incredibly-comfortable kitten. 

He starts his first shift at the artsy cafe, the next day.

He's met at the employee entrance by a local elf, approximately female shaped, her long black hair pulled into a low ponytail, who says, and signs, "I'll be the one getting you oriented. Come on in, I'll explain the hand signals we use in the lounge, see if you're getting them, then your shift can start, alright?"

“Sure! I’m Aiti- what should I call you?”

"Binamir, or just Bina." And she leads the way to the employee lounge.

And then, surprising no one, he is in the emoloyee’s lounge.

”So, the hand signals...?”

She'll demonstrate them, and explain - luckily the basic server ones are simple, and distinct from each other. There's modifications for unusual limbs, she mentions, which mostly isn't relevant but one of their servers has tentacles, she'll have zem show him zir version if the two of them're ever on shift at the same time.

He’s perfectly attentive, and has each hand signal down in fairly short order.

Then he can be shown the way to the stage, between rushes, and Bina can return to her usual waitress job.

And he can dance!

He continues to be astonishingly good at dancing. He’s focusing a bit less on showing off, now, as compared to the audition- can’t quite maintain the same pace over a drawn-out shift- but he remains nigh-excessively perfect. Like a painting in motion, or a strangely substantial spirit of grace, spun out of starlight and silent laughter.

Bina signals he's doing well during a break.

The diners seem to agree - he's there over a two hour rush, and gathers around fifty vigs total, in addition to his pay. (Bina communicates later this is really good for a first performance - though people tend to tip better when they know someone.)

He’s still sort of unclear on the value of a vig, and puzzled by the concept of tipping- it’d been part of the cultural brochure, but it remained kinda bizarre- but he declines to make either of these facts obvious. His tippers each get a radiant smile for their trouble.

And then, once he’s counted his money-

He strides down the street, extensively consults his little tucked-away map, and heads towards the nearest library. 

The largest libraries are the ones connected to the universities, which generally require a school ID to enter. There's smaller libraries, though, scattered among the towers - the nearest one is a little community library, dark and close and cozy with little islands of light, with the sort of random assortment of books that makes it seem like it's been built from successive generations of small donations, wills, and flea markets.

(There's a small plaque out front explaining the initial formation was due to the efforts of a local teacher and campaigner for increased access to education, who donate the entirety of her personal collection. Most of the books are geared towards people learning to read, either as children or as immigrants.)

Well, he isn’t exactly learning to read, but reading through children’s books seems like a decent method of acquiring generic cultural familiarity... 

He sits down on a conveniently located chair, acquires a stack of books with particularly well-worn covers, and sets to skimming.

This girl rabbit is upset that these adult rabbits think girls should be a certain way, so she goes on a great adventure and becomes a famous builder, and her family learns they were wrong. 

This mouse is scared of the snakes and the cats and the birds, but learns how to stand up to bullies with his friends' help.

Sometimes your friends are going to be very different! These kids are immigrants! These kids have one parent, or three parents, or parents of different species or cultures, or other different ways. This kid doesn't have legs, and this one has legs, but they don't work. This one can't hear, and talks with her hands. This one can't see, and this one sees different things than elves. 

There is a crayon. The crayon is yellow, but everyone thinks he should be green, and they keep getting mad he's drawing things wrong. He keeps trying to draw green things like leaves and the ground, until a friend convinces him to draw yellow things like trains and flowers, which makes him happy.

In a book of folktales, the mysterious and probably extra magical princess is courted by a bunch of princes. She gives them tasks they must fulfill that are all impossible. All but one of the princes try to cheat at the tasks. One sends her a letter apologizing to her, for courting her when she seemed annoyed and for his brothers' poor behavior. She is interested and sends him a letter back, but then must return to her home in Faerie. The polite prince sends her little gifts from the world she had to leave, and when she returns she marries him and they live happily ever after.

There is a bad plague. A lot of people die and are very sad. The gods don't do anything. The Serpents start telling people not to depend on the gods. A woman wearing heavy armor with a rose on the front gives a speech about how the gods aren't just unreliable - they're bad (the book's narrator presents this more neutrally, and seems to agree with the Serpents more). She makes the Roses. Her name is Sabi Jobai. The god Imgah gets mad at her, and his followers attack hers. Sabi takes up her sword against Imgah himself. The fight lasts three days, and Sabi strikes down Imgah, her sword becoming magical. The Black Roses figure out how to make sure elves don't have to go to a godly afterlife, and it's because of them any elf at all can be resurrected.

They sure do have an ‘idealization and encouragement of nonconformity’ motif going strong. And an obviously different tradition of illustration- less exaggerated perspective, less color saturation, different regions of stylization. 

He leaves. He acquires lunch as an iguana, from a reptile-oriented vendor. He comes back.

Is there anything in the fluent-speaker section which seems relatively striking?

Some histories, some books about government and politics, a few travel guides, plenty of works of fiction and poetry ("classics," "foreign," "serial," and "modern" are grouped separately), written puzzles, a series of books geared towards the aspiring student of arcane magic, assorted encyclopedias, a collection of old shopping catalogs for furniture and clothing and the like, and an entire collection of what's labeled "manners guides" - on things like courtship, flower language, the proper writing of a formal letter, proper dress (with little cards inside giving clarification on what's out of date and what isn't).

He plucks out a history, a classic poetry compilation, and a manners guide on courtship, and strides on over to the place that looks reasonably front-desk-esque, books in hand.

”Hi. I’m new. What sort of process do you have, here?”

There's a bored girl who seems in late adolescence, and is reading through books between conversations. She glances up at him. "We need some guarantee you'll return the books, or pay up a replacement fee if you don't, for taking them out. Being known's fine, but since you're new, we usually accept 'leave the potential replacement fee with us', and we'll return it when you bring the books back."

“How much, then, would the replacement fee on these be?”

"Poetry one's a bit harder to replace, so, like, a vig. The history's everywhere and a bit out of date, so a kint for that. Three kints for the manner's guide, it's newer and that's a decently good edition, but it's also easier to find."

He is still so confused by their economy- maybe housing and food and books are all government subsidized, or something. He hands over two vigs, tells her to keep the extra kint as a donation, and tucks the books into nowhere-in-particular. 

Does his map have any convenient apartment buildings marked down, or conspicuous ‘this is a long-term rentable residence more glamorous than a hostel’ signs?

Not really. It's mostly focused on shorter term businesses, or things open to the public. There are hotels and assorted other residences with signs out front, advertising usually either weekly or daily rates, ranging from what averages out to four vigs a night for not much better than his hostel, to a minimum of twenty vigs a night if he wants his own bathroom and a probable minimum of mysterious stains and roaches. (No mysterious stains nor roaches, at a bland but not fancy place seems closer to fifty vigs a night at a minimum. Nicer places aren't advertising anywhere he can see.)

(The books are printed, on cheap paper, and have indications inside of many large runs, which might explain some of the affordability).

He can magic away mysterious stains and roaches pretty trivially, and anyone who decides to be conspicuously shady in his direction can spend the next while turned into a turtle. He picks one of the twenty-vig-a-night places, optimizing for space and ability-to-customize and not so much quality per-se, and lugs his luggage on over. He uses up most of the day, casting miscellaneous home-improvement spells and settling in.

He arrives at the cafe, the next day. 

Binamir seems worried and distracted, but does get him set up for his assigned shift. He hasn't managed to get a rush two days in a row - those are extremely prized for performers and servers alike - but she signs that if he's vigilant he can probably manage more in future weeks.

He continues to be obscenely good at dancing, and he’s getting more in tune with local conventions, with the art of being friendly and approachable whilst incapable of speech, and with general customer service; he still manages a substantial haul. 

He picks up on Binamir’s anxiety. He finds that he cares.

“- it seems like something’s bothering you,” he observes, quietly, when he’s finished counting his cash. “Would it help, at all, if I donated my ears and my sympathetic nodding, or would you prefer it if I kept my busybody tendencies to myself?”

She bites her lip, then breathes out heavily. "Yeah. Yeah. Probably. Don't know who to talk to, or if I even should..." She runs a hand through her hair. "This guy disappeared. Older guy. Runs the dinky old laundromat I take my clothes to."

"He's not here legally, I don't think, or he's harboring someone not here legally - I don't want to go to the officials, but I think 'deported' is better than 'dead' and something weird's going on, but... I don't want to drag an official eye over to the neighborhood, either. Or start a headhunt. So I don't know what to do."

“I have more power in my pocket than is implied by my choice of profession. I can help. Do you want to meet up, at the end of your shift, talk this over in more depth?”

"Yeah. Thanks. I'm off shift in four hours."

“Great,” he says, softly. 

And then he leaves, and acquires lunch, and kills time in the nearby-ish park, turning into assorted squirrels and birds and cats and exotic insects, enjoying the weather.

He’s back at the cafe, four hours later.

Bina's sitting on the stoop, and stands, seeming nervous, when he approaches. "Come on," she says, "There's a park people don't go to much, we can talk there. Or a cafe that tends to be crowded, and really hard to hear people, your choice."

“The park works. Anything you feel comfortable outlining on the way?”

She leads the way.

"Mostly just what I've said? I was looking around a bit, I think someone else in the area might've also not shown up for work without warning - unusually so - but I'm not sure that's related... There was also a dude acting weird last time I went there, which was what got me glancing a bit closer."

He nods.

They reach the park.

”Okay,” he says, when they seem to have achieved relative privacy. “Do you want to tell me the details of the situation first- the guy’s name, what he looks like, the address, the same for those other people, all of that- or should I outline how I’m initially inclined to help, first?”

"...How you're inclined to help, yeah."

“I can turn into almost any animal I’ve seen, turn into mist, let other people turn into animals, do miscellaneous magic. If I have something that identifies the missing man, I can try to scry for him. I can’t get all the way to ‘unlimited range’ off of anything you can give me, but blood or hair would let me find him, if he’s still inside city limits. I’m inclined to scry for people, spy on people, talk to people, act as an extra set of eyes and hands, as you’d like; I’m not inclined to go to anyone official without your say-so.

"How detectable is your magic - druids can turn into animals, too, but you can spot it if you know a lot about animal behavior or if you can detect magic, I heard."

"I mean, he probably can't detect magic, but."

"I might be able to find hair? Blood won't be a thing, though. The suspicious guy is - maybe the missing guy's grandson, maybe someone he's covering for, it's really not clear. He's from the same place as the missing guy, and. Uh. A really bad liar. So I don't know what's going on but I know every excuse he's given was bogus."

“If I tried shapeshifting and didn’t have my particular knack for it, those would be problems. I do, and they aren’t. Have I given you enough information that you can give me a more complete tactical breakdown, or do you have other concerns?”

"Right. So - last night I went in to do my laundry. The laundromat's owner's - let's call him grandson, Gregari - was hanging around. Late at night, no one's around. Gregari starts babbling about how he's the only one there, Mister Petiv is... And then he kind of stuttered around, said sleeping, because that's what you do at night, you sleep, unless you are running an all night laundry like Gregari. I was tired, thinking, okay, whatever, he's weird... Then I tripped over this jacket on the floor. It was damp and sticky and Gregari distracted me before I could look under it, and he cleaned it up while I wasn't looking, but he missed a tooth.

"And he missed the yelling I heard from the employee room, and - I get dreams. Usually they're weird, talking to dead people who give me cryptic but useful advice, but this - this was above and beyond. Partially prophetic, which hasn't happened in a couple generations, but... Petiv is definitely missing. I'm not sure he's in the city. I'm not sure he's - I want to say on this planet, but 'in this reality' might be better because he was in the dream-place. Didn't really get a chance to talk to him, just saw him sitting, trapped. I don't just randomly trust even my dreams, so I did some snooping, and Gregari's been acting weird for a while, and Petiv went missing two days ago. No warning. People heard an argument, but... It's the part of town where you mind your own business. No one intervened, no one will admit to seeing anything."

"I have a thing from the dream-place, if that helps with scrying. My grandmother handed me a scarf, said I'd need it. I also kind of bled there a bit."

“Okay, so that sounds like Gregari went on drugs, had an argument, murdered his grandfather, eventually dismembered the body, and happened to be really clumsy about disposing of evidence, because he was on drugs, but the thing with the dream-place complicates things... I have no idea what to make of all that, honestly. Maybe it’ll click together if I spend a while as a fly on the wall, or if the scrying pans out. I don’t imagine you kept the tooth?”

"I don't have it on me, but I know where it is, I initially figured someone might want it back before stuff started getting freaky."

“It’d be real weird if you’d kept it in your pocket during your shift. Teeth are actually better than hair or blood, might be enough for me to try past-scrying... the scarf might also help, there’s not a ton of precedent. Could you tell me more about the prophetic dream - did it happen before or after the thing with the tooth, what did you see besides Petiv...”

"Before. I got overwhelmingly sleepy at the laundromat - not sure if that was supernatural or not, I hadn't slept in a while - before too many alarm bells went off, and took a nap on a bench. I saw... Not everything is translatable? But for the bulk of it I was a child talking to my dead grandmother. I was drawing a thing I was insisting on keeping from - well, my older self? Because it wasn't done yet, but I know it was green and scrunched up and hard to draw because it's weird, weird and in a lot of places all at once... And kid-me was talking to my grandmother about monsters, and what to do when you're scared and you're facing something bigger and meaner than you. This was - an altered memory. Petiv showed up, arguing with my mom about eyes, there was a dog with a green snake... And then my grandmother gave me her scarf, because it might help, and I woke up with it in my hand."

"This is sounding... grander, than a missing person's case. I'm increasingly suspicious that it’s important for this to be unravelled quickly. Is there anything else we need to cover, before you get the tooth and scarf?"

She hesitates, takes a deep breath, then shakes her head. "I don't think so, but I could be forgetting something. And supernaturally weird stuff's not too uncommon around here, unfortunately. I don't know if it gets any bigger than 'my dreams are communicating he's a doppelganger, but weirdly'."

“I can still see why the city doesn’t put that in their brochures. Lead the way?”

She will. "Less so than a lot of planets. Half the immigrants I talk to are surprised we're so normal."

The laundromat's a few blocks over, in a more rundown part of town. The lights don't all seem enthused about working. Bina lives a few floors above it in the same tower, and stashed the tooth in her room. "Best place I could think to put it. My roommate should be out, but she's kind of - enthusiastic a lot, sorry if she starts chattering at you."

“I doubt that I’ll mind,” he says, following her in and directing no small amount of wariness towards the laundromat. 

Bina's apartment is small and cramped and obviously shared between two people often too busy to do a lot of tidying. She fetches the tooth from her room quickly enough, though, and then leads Shaitiren out and down.

The laundromat looks perfectly normal from the outside - a sign informs passerby that it's open all night, and it's a bit shabby, and somewhere between 'deserted' and 'not too busy.' Bina hesitates outside, but doesn't see the suspect.

"So, here it is. What do you need for the scry?" she asks.

“Nothing that’s not here. I’m going to do a past-scry on the tooth; I can get it to tell us both what the person it was attached to looks like. If we can confirm that it belongs to the missing guy, I can use the tooth to see if he’s still in the city, and, if so, where he is. If he isn’t in the city, I can try cludging something together that takes the scarf and the tooth as reference points and hopefully spits out something usable. If none of that works, I can come up with new ideas... and we should do this in an alley, being conpicuous is a bad idea.”

"Does my apartment work? Amil's in class right now, so..."

“That works.”

And then they can go to her apartment.

“- reitesu rewë shotho, reitesu rewë shotho,” gesture, gesture, a staff slamming dramatically onto the floor-

Who does the tooth - now floating in midair, covered in a semi-translucent illusion of the person it once belonged to, and making a quiet, ominous humming noise - belong to?

An old bald man, around Bina's height. Bina identifies him as the missing owner.

Great. 

Further spellcasting ensues.

Is he in the city?

He appears to be simultaneously in the city, not in the city, scattered as a fine paste across the city, in a hole deeper than the city drilling beneath Shaitiren's feet, and overlapping with Bina.

... he reports this result to Bina.

"Yeah that sounds like weirdness. I'm not certain the dream-realm is classically located in real space? The 'fine paste' might be diffuse magic that's confusing it, I'm the closest link to the dream-realm probably, but I'm really not sure what's up with the hole."

“I’d suspect someone of deliberately screwing with us, but to get the fuckery that fine-grained you’d need ridiculous amounts of magic, or you’d need to be specifically trying to block out Ruwien mages... I can try the scarf, now.”

He spends a moment laying out his parameters - it needs to not transmit various vision-based weirdness, if applicable, it doesn’t need to be in color, it doesn’t need anything other than a still frame, providing an overhead view of the guy, it needs to location-trace the scarf and use that to narrow its search-area, it needs to do a thousand other little things and it needs to be as brutally minimalistic as possible -

He casts.

His magic is not positive that scarf exists. His magic is not positive that thing in his hands is a scarf. 

It's miles long, stretching into the sky, crossing a gap between worlds - a river of red hooked to a star (the red is very insistent on showing up against the grey-scale) - wrapped in a brief flash around a strange woman's neck - 

At the end, or at least not too far from it, is a man on a couch with a wire in his head. He's looking at something out of the picture.

He decides not to panic.

He doesn’t even need to spend mana, in order to transcribe the river of red, the scene with the woman, and the scene with the man, onto conjured pieces of paper; he does so, presenting the papers to Bina.

“The scarf is magical in unclear ways; it showed up as red, even though the scry as a whole was firmly monochrome, and it may or may not actually be a scarf. This paper shows the missing man, this one shows a woman that the scry inexplicably pointed at, this one shows the scarf being bizarre... do you recognize the woman?”

"I had a dream with her, maybe? She was very confused at me appearing in her office. She seemed perfectly normal at the time, other than being in a dream. She's fuzzy in my head, though, so I'm not sure that's the same woman."

“Okay, so. Now that I’ve managed it once, I’m confident that I can view the dreamplace again, widen the overhead view, see whatever that guy is staring at, but I’m concerned that whatever this guy is staring at is - somehow infohazardous or hypnotic - and I don’t, really, want to take any substantial risk of going mad. Are you absolutely sure that you don’t want to go to the authorities on this, and do you have any less risky ideas.”

"I'm less sure than I was, but - I really don't think I trust them. For ideas... I tend to be safe from infohazards in my dreams. That's about it, and, yeah, it's getting to the point where I think we might just need to call in someone with better resources..."

“I guess I shouldn’t rule out the idea that the government’s been somehow infiltrated... do you have anyone in mind?”

"I don't actually know anyone? I'm kind of new-ish to the city. I think going somewhere not around here might be a good idea, my roommate keeps insisting this part of town is run by the mob? There's definitely some level of corruption, though honestly the mob probably wants whatever handled, too."

“I moved here a couple of days ago... I think that I want to try out ‘spying as a fly on the wall’ before I try ‘going to the mob’, strategically.”

"There might also be a time concern, if he's actively going after people..."

“It seems unlikely, prima facie, but we can’t rule it out. And the ‘mob’ option wouldn’t be fast, either, they’d want evidence and confirmation and internal debate and everything, and they might not have more of an idea what to do than us. And they could be compromised. If we think this is really urgent I can try to tie him down, read his mind, and erase the memory...”

"No. No. I... Don't think we can say it's that urgent, not yet."

“Thought so.”

Nod.

"Do you want me to go with you to the laundromat?"

“... no, probably not. I don’t think that you’d be worth more there, as one more potential victim, instead of - out, looking up people we might be able to contact for help, brainstorming, researching explanations, asking for information around town.”

"Right. I'll put on my investigative journalist hat, then."

”If it works,” he says.

And then they can head their separate ways.

And he can flit into the laundromat as a small, inconspicuous little gnat. 

The laundromat is mostly incredibly boring. The big guy Binamir identified as Gregari paces around some, acts a bit shifty and nervous a lot, and as it gets properly into 'nighttime' (having already been deep into evening) the laundromat empties, he seems to hear something, and goes out back. He'd put some of his own clothes into one of the smaller washers a bit back - horribly muddy things, that smelled odd, primarily like brick dust but faintly of ozone. It's still humming along, the old magic struggling.

He's muttering to himself as he walks off.

He updates slightly towards ‘magically influenced’ and ‘willing cooperator’, slightly away from ‘outright possessed’.

Being a gnat for any extended period of time is kind of horrible, and he’ll need hands, to do anything sophisticated. He turns back into a humanoid, peers around for anything obviously suspicious or anyone quietly shouting ‘help me! help me!’, and takes a closer look at the washer.

It's really going, rocking back and forth slightly now. The settings are odd, but Gregari seems to have used some kind of employee by-pass on it, so it's hard to tell if that's normal.

It’s a little weird, but unlikely to involve horrible conspiracy...

He spends a little while staring at it. The rocking motion is mildly hypnotic, and he’s mildly suspicious about the brick dust and ozone. 

It goes still, and remains such for a short while -

Then there's a loud thump as it rocks to the side.

He takes several, careful steps backwards.

(It’s probably just a faulty enchantment, it’s probably just a faulty enchantment, it’s - hopefully just a faulty enchantment -)

Thump! Thump!

It teeters, falls - 

And a white arm stretches out, followed by a dog-like skull and then a body. The creature looks sketched into reality, and like someone forgot to color it in. It pulses with static, and moves oddly, jittery like an insect in shutter stop motion.

It looks right at him.

... this is deeply concerning.

He could turn into a fly, hang out on the ceiling - but he’s not sure what sort of senses spontaneously teleporting pseudo-dogs work with, could just make him easier to squish - and it takes time to cast spells - none of his other contingencies really apply -

He’s just going to edge towards the door.

Its head tracks him - 

And then it surges forwards.

In theory he should be capable of stopping it with a force pearl, in practice he’s never actually tried targeting one in high-stress conditions -

He turns into a rapid-flying little insect, flits towards the ceiling, might make him easier to squish but he’s likely to be squished anyways if he does nothing -

It angles its head up, opens its mouth - 

The world is suspiciously green, and gravity is suspiciously strong.

He’s briefly disoriented.

And then he’s somewhere else.

There's a bench beneath him. It's daylight, but thin and weak and not entirely there. The place looks industrial, but the buildings are low-rise and unfamiliar.

There is also now a dog trying to jump in his lap. The dog looks drawn, like the not-hound, but is otherwise apparently a perfectly normal small beagle. 

This isn’t really how he anticipated his evening going.

... he lets the dog onto his lap, pets it for a little while, and then stands up, with - it? him? her? - in his arms. Absent-minded ear-scritches continue.

He looks around at his surroundings, exasperatedly, in search of further detail.

The place seems to be a receiving area such as for flyers or teleporters, or perhaps an empty loading area for goods, or a holding area for large beings or crowds or items. It's difficult to tell. The place is empty and largely featureless, the buildings surrounding it forming a solid wall relieved only by the lines between sets - and an iron gate on one end, next to a door with a glass window.

That sure is an obvious setup.

He closes his eyes, briefly, lets out a quiet sigh, continues supplying scritches to the weird dog thing that’s probably somehow related to the substantially more terrifying not-a-dog thing...

And he approaches the door and the gate, of course. Nothing else bears doing.

The dog is very happy about the scritches! He wriggles a bit as Shaitiren approaches the gate - not enough to dislodge himself, but enough to be moderately awkward.

The gate leads to a short alleyway, which seems to open into a wider, lit area. The door leads into the building to the alleyway's left.

Well, he could turn into a bird and fly over the gate, but he couldn’t carry the dog that way, could he. And the dog seems both potentially important, and undeserving of being stranded.

He tries to open the door.

It opens easily to reveal a room, devoid of any obvious magic. It seems to be an office - there's two desks, a safe, thick leather-bound books above the safe, assorted piles of more books and papers, and a tremendous number of mechanical knick-knacks on the desk opposite him, beneath a window with the blinds drawn. The light's off. There's no dust, and it looks like whoever just stepped out.

The dog seems to really want to get down and explore. There's a possibility of smells here!

This is SO FUCKING BIZARRE -

He continues declining to panic, sets the dog down - gently, delicately, like they might be made out of horrible explosives - and un-blinds the window. 

Smells!!!

(The window reveals a massive courtyard beyond - apparently the same one past the tunnel. Numerous doors lead off it, some of them loading bays, most closed, a few cracked open odd amounts. The air is thin and the sky is blandly blue and there's no wildlife whatsoever.)

Great.

He turns into a bird, flits out of the room, makes a sharp turn, and flits over the gate, into the larger, better lit area. The dog can probably handle herself for two minutes.

It hasn't really changed from the view in the office. It still looks like somebody just stole the architecture mid-second and left the people and things in it behind.

He lets out a little bird sigh, and flies back to the room and the dog.

Scritch, scritch, the murder of fifteen minutes rifling through the papers and books for anything of interest...

The dog accepts scratches, then wanders off, and comes back with something in her mouth.

She found an interesting! Person, look at the interesting! (It's hers though, no take only look. Throw is maybe acceptable. But no take!)

Books seem like a dead end. Damn it.

What can he discern about the interesting object without attempting to pry it from her jaws?

It's sort of oblong and kind of dirty and vaguely organically colored.

(The books are indeed mostly either illegible or blank.)

... he doesn’t have a ton of room in his pocket dimension - maybe as much as he’d have in a bag of luggage - but that’s enough for a few miscellaneous comestibles.

He pulls out a strip of salmon jerky.

Food is definitely worth giving the person the interesting! She'll happily make the trade.

Great.

What... is ‘the interesting’, exactly?

It's a cylinder, under all that dirt. Not wood, but something textured just like it enough to feel weird. Heavy and solid, with the weight evenly distributed. Looks like it was dug up out of somewhere. There's little lines, which feel even enough to be possibly decoration - or seams. 

It... could be some sort of canister?

He tries opening it, since he doesn’t have anything much more useful to do. Might submit to unscrewing, might have some little crag or nubbin that’d let him pop it open with the right application of pressure...

(He could try spelling it open with a dash of thaumaturgy, but sensible Ruwiens are raised on a steady diet of storybooks, as children, and one of those storybook’s most prominent moral lessons is ‘don’t try casting spells in unknown environmental conditions’. It probably wouldn’t go horribly wrong in some unfortunately ironic way, but excessive caution often served better than insufficient caution, regardless. A lack of sufficient caution, after all, was why he was currently in a weird magical alternative dimension, socializing with an eldritch dog-thing.)

It's difficult to open, with a trick to it, but it will eventually click and let him pull it into sections.

There's a scroll inside the cylinder, old and crackly and with no visible writing from where it's rolled up.

Well, what is he going to do, sit here and play fetch with the dog for an hour, of course he unfurls it.

He considers using a mirror, but discards the idea; if this whole convoluted affair was a leadup to a madness-inducing scroll, he thinks that he’s going to pat the head of whoever set it up and tell them to make their maniacal plots less ridiculously complicated next time.

It's a rather abstract drawing, that may be a map, may be a geometric representation of a cosmic horror, may be an experiment in weird lines, depending on how he squints at it.

He squints at it in several different positions, from every possible angle, backlit, frontlit, from the side, as several different sorts of animals who have odd color ranges and visual perspectives, and in the closest thing he can find to complete darkness! Doesn’t hurt to be thorough.

The map shifts slightly each time, showing sometimes subtle changes - a door here, a wall there - and sometimes a different layout entirely. The only thing constant is a square in the middle that has a single exit, leading to a larger area with more exits.

That... seems like a hint? That he should go out above the gate, again? Maybe? He doesn’t know, he’s never taken a class in deciphering mysterious ever-changing cartography.

He tucks away the map, turns into a bird - a raven, this time, for variety - and swoops back out over the gate, into the larger area.

It seems the same as the last time he saw it, though since he didn't stop to count the number of doors or measure the sides he can't be sure.

No, no he can’t.

He lands on a roof, detransforms, and plucks up the map from nowhere-in-particular - does it look much different, here?

It's shifted somewhat. The parts he can see match up. The starting area might be a slightly different size?

Also there is a dog barking at him from the ground. Person wandered off! But she's a good girl and found her! This is a fun game!

Shaitiren tucks away the map, shifts into a bird, flits down to the ground, and shifts back. Absent-minded pets are allocated.

It doesn’t seem like he’ll actually be able to manage to solve this situation without using new magic. 

He sighs, internally.

He takes out his wand and staff, mutters, gestures, and casts.

Among the many things that Ruwien magic can do is ‘allow for communication with animals’.

“Can you understand me?” he says, understandably.

"Hello!!!" she says, brightly. "How are you talking?"

His smile is a bit forced.

”Hi! I’m using a spell: I can only hold it for a little while. While I have it on, could you tell me about where we are? I have more treats.”

"Treats are good! I don't know. I was playing the run away game with my person. Then I smelled a SMELL and dug for it and found the bad thing, and then my human was shouting and I couldn't move and something bad happened and I fell and I was here."

“Could you describe the bad thing in further detail? Do you know how I could get out of here?”

"Smelled bad. I thought it was a dead thing but it wasn't. I don't know. I can't get out. You fell from the sky, though."

... he looks up at the sky, so as to discern if it has any stars.

No - 

Unless - 

There's one, high above, shining like a beacon over the place he entered.

Oh thank fuck for half-remembered bits of secondhand dream imagery.

He pets the dog, one last time, and dispenses a bit of jerky. There’s an air of finality to it.

And then he’s flying, flying, flying, as the fastest bird he’s ever known, towards that single star in the sky.

It's a long flight, the distance blurring dream-like in his mind, and he doesn't remember the end of it - 

And he wakes up, a hard bench under him.

He spends a moment collecting his bearings and beating back his internal cascade of ‘what the fuck! what the fuck just happened!’ in favor of some more productive line of thought.

And then he’s walking rapidly towards the door.

(If he looks: the washing machine that produced the not-dog appears to have never been there. There's no sign of it having been dragged off or missing, and there's a dryer there now instead.)

No one accosts him on his way out.

He notes this down, passively, as he skedaddles.

Hello, door to Bina’s apartment. He would apologize for knocking on you with unnecessary force, but he’s not really in the mood.

She opens it.

"What happened?" she asks, stepping by to let him in.

“I fell into an alternative dream dimension after being bathed in green light by an eldritch monstrosity. There were scritches. I’ve had a day.”

"...Lime green? Like the fruit."

“Yes,” he says, closing the door.

"I'm think that's probably really not good, 'green' and 'monster' was kinda linked in my dream... What else happened?"

“I turned humanoid while the laundromat-owner was away, since being a gnat is unpleasant. The eldritch abomination crawled out of a washer. It emitted green light, and I was suddenly in a mysterious dream dimension, with a dog that may or may not have been a second form of the eldritch abomination - there were visual similarities. There was a bizarre ever-shifting map, there, and otherwise little of interest. I quizzed the dog: it said that it had unearthed a ‘bad thing’ and then fallen to the mysterious dream dimension. I remembered the thing from my scrying where the scarf hooked in on the only star in that sky, flew towards the only star in the mysterious dream dimension’s sky, and then I was back in the laundromat.

That covers it.”

"That doesn't sound super like my dream dimension, if the world was stable one minute to the next and the narrative never jumped around in the time frame. Still. I think outside help should be a thing, now...."

“Oh?”

"The dream dimension? It's dreamlike. Like, I'll be talking to my grandmother and then the scene just - changes - and it's later or earlier and I know what happened in between, or we'll be talking and she'll remind me about something that hasn't happened yet that I forgot. Or I'll be remembering that one time my ex-friend told a horribly embarrassing story and I'll be listening and in the story at the same time, and then the story changes and the person telling it gets confused - in and out of the story - because it didn't happen that way, and sometimes things from one memory follow me into another, and they don't fit."

“By ‘oh?’ I meant ‘that sounds like you have particular outside help in mind’, not ‘I’m unclear on the properties of your dream dimension’, although that clarification is also useful.”

"Ah, sorry. No. I don't have anyone in mind in particular, unless my roommate knows someone but dragging her into this might be a bad idea."

“If she isn’t secretly in on it, could be good to have another set of eyes, another set of ears...”

"I don't think she knows how secrets work, is the main problem."

“Okay. I don’t have any close friends, you don’t trust your obvious candidate, and the people who’d ordinarily deal with this are potentially compromised, and you don’t have any ideas for people we could go to; our options for acquiring help seem fairly limited. Proceeding under the idea that we can’t get help, do you have any ideas about what we should do?”

She runs a hand through her hair. "I usually run when I'm scared. At or away. Not the best person for this." A huff, and: "We need to know more. That might mean going into my dreams to actually talk to people - I think it's possible when I'm awake, I just don't know how. Or finding some way of spying directly on Gregari, we might be able to steal something of his?"

“Scrying directly on people is feasible in the short term - like for finding out where they are, or in order to catch a few minutes of conversation - but not for anything long-term, you can’t make spells self-sustaining when they have a living target and an actively magical effect. I could set something up to scry on the laundromat full time if I - did something personally distasteful and traumatic but not actually unethical - and I should do that, maybe do the same thing for wherever he lives.” 

"I don't want you to traumatize yourself. I don't even know how much it'd help, or if he'd be able to sense being watched - a lot of people can."

“That’s sweet. I don’t know if we can afford it, but - 

I can do it if you try the and fail with the dream quest thing, I guess, it probably isn’t urgent on the scale of hours.”

"Yeah. I might be able to take you with me, but I don't know the risk factors on that - help won't hurt but having someone who can act out here is good..."

“I set up some wards on this room before you try, just in case, and then we both go?”

"That should do it, yeah. My roommate knows not to go in here..."

“Okay, then, I’ll go ahead and do that -”

Eyes closed, spontaneously appearing instruments of magic, about fifteen seconds of muttering and gesturing and periodically tapping the staff on the floor, no obvious special effects -

“Done.”

"Good." Deep breath. "I think the best way to try this involves meditating. Possibly I should be holding your hand to remind me not to lose you..."

“That works with me.”

She'll guide him to sit across from her on the floor, then, holding his hands and slipping into a meditative trance.

Somewhere in there, the world becomes faintly floaty.

He’s never before been quite so glad to have a magic system which works off of relatively explicable logic, instead of vague intuition and eldritch abominations appearing in laundromats and possibly-hallucinatory dream dimensions.

He goes along with the floatiness, to the extent that he can.

There's a six year old Binamir drawing something very important, tongue sticking between her teeth, little washed out dog at her feet.

Adult Binamir looks around, ignoring her kid self.

The walls of the room aren't very well defined, so it's hard to say where she is.

He follows Bina’s lead in ignoring the mysterious dream child who looks probably-related-to-her.

” - I never asked - do we have an exact plan of attack here, or are we mostly just winging it? Who are we going to talk to, how are we going to talk to them, what are we going to say...”

"It's hard to not wing it with this type of thing, unfortunately. But we're trying to find the old guy, ask him what happened, maybe get him out of here if that can be done."

Young Bina is worrying very loudly in her head about her parents fighting.

Bina looks around, says, "Come on," and goes to jump out the window she's pretty sure used to be here.

Shaitiren goes to follow her. 

(He’s jumped out of windows before, after all - it’s a less intimidating prospect when you can turn into a bird halfway down.)

They're elsewhere. The air is sort of yellow, and it's raining softly. Bina hums, ignores a younger version of herself laughing with a girl as they run out of the rain, and climbs a fire escape.

Beyond there is a white room with girls sketched in - probably early adolescents - with only a small splash of color each, and the little dog sleeping, and one's telling a story about herself and Binamir - 

There's a scratching outside the door and in the story and the scene's kind of flickering.

He has no idea about how concerned he should be about any of these facts. Bina’s lead: continues to be followed.

Binamir groans. "I hate this memory," she mutters - and indeed younger Bina looks miserable and upset - and steps towards the girl telling it. "But I think we might be able to get somewhere in the story... And I don't want to linger long, I don't like that scratching."

“Oh, so it is appropriate to be concerned about that. I was wondering.”

(He leans down, and pets the little dog - no real reason not to.)

"Not original to my memory. Which is usually bad."

Creak, creak, creak, and now the girls are stopping talking and getting confused and alarmed by the sounds outside.

"And we should go." 

Except one of the girls notices them - the first one to have actually done that properly. 

"What's going on? This didn't happen - how did I know that - Sam's story was wrong," she says, addressing the grown-up Binamir. The other two girls appear entirely unaware of their observer. "Who're you, anyways?" she asks Shaitiren. 

He’ll worry about the ethical implications of dream people reacting to novel stimuli later - 

“Don’t have time to chat, kid - where are we going to?”

"Bina are you okay - " the girl asks.

As Binamir says "The factory story had the weirdest changes, I think we need to start there - "

And the door bursts open.

- Shaitiren continues not being trained in using force pearls in combat, and accordingly doesn’t manage to block it in the doorway, but he’s been thinking over about how he’d take down the damn thing, and one idea pops into mind quickly enough to override the terror and decision paralysis -

Hi, eldritch abomination. Have a - ridiculously durable and difficult to move, perfectly smooth - force pearl, formed suddenly in the place that your paw is going to land, while you’re still in mid stride, another one positioned such that you’ll slam straight into it, and a bundle of a dozen different random articles of clothing suddenly snatched from nowhere and thrown in your face by someone who is, in the next moment, a small, quick little bird.

The hound is very unhappy with this, and its jaws creak open warningly.

"Time to go!" Bina shouts, scooping up the little dog, and heading towards the window. "Shaitiren try not to get lost, I'm not sure what happens if we split up!"

The small, quick little bird isn’t capable of making snarky comments in response to that, unfortunately, but it is capable of fluttering over and clinging to her shoulder. It does so.

She darts through -

And they're elsewhere, light dim enough they can barely see, air smelling like dust and clay, walls blackened by fire, debris on the ground.

"...Is this the factory?" mystery dream girl asks.

A bird flutters off Bina’s shoulder, and ceases to be a bird.

(He is unclear on how this is supposed to lead them to the old man. Bina is presumably following mysterious rules of dreamland navigation that are too complicated to trivially explain.) 

"Yeah. It's different, though. Doesn't feel like the same factory."

Also how is Lash following her, this usually doesn't happen.

She sighs. To Shaitiren: "I'm mostly trying to find stuff that's - out of place. Doesn't fit with its surroundings, or with my memories. Second one's mostly on me, but - you're observant. If you see anything that's weird or unusual or not what you'd expect, tell me, okay?"

Apparently dreamland navigation isn’t too complicated to trivially explain. He sort of wishes she’d mentioned that earlier, but maybe it’s a contingent strategy and the more likely one was more complex -

“Okay,” he says. 

He’d already been passively scanning their surroundings, but he can do it more intently, and with a different focus - anything that doesn’t seem to be following ordinary physical law, anything with shadows misplaced, anything that seems to induce out of the ordinary emotions when observed, anything that seems even slightly incongruous brought up to conscious attention and then either dismissed or or analyzed...

Muffled voices, in and out in waves, that Bina doesn't seem to be reacting to - 

Tiles scattered on the floor with strange scratches that seem to be a lot of different things all at once - 

A young Bina, voice reedy, saying "Sam I think we should leave - "

And something smells like ozone and brick dust.

Lash is walking around, peering at stuff - she clearly notices the tiles, listens to the muffled voices - "I think I know what they're saying, but it's weird, something about displacing the factory and its shadows echoing?" she whispers.

Shaitiren does not have strong preconcieved notions about the ordinary odor of factories.

“How vaguely ominous... Bina, can you not see the obvious, magical tiles on the floor or hear the possibly-magical voices coming through the walls, or are you choosing not to react to those things for other reasons.”

"Uhhhh yeah do either of you see that."

She points.

There's a dog skull, illuminated rather dramatically as she gestures.

“... 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?”

"I don't know which spells would even help. My ideas - we should look in the places I haven't been. In the office. Try and see if we can find an internal staircase up or down."

Or jump down the hole. That sounds like nightmare logic.

“Fine. You’d know better than I. Gods, may the Sleeping Prince awaken from his slumber, I wish that I’d just gone through with the damn -“

Shaitiren does not, ordinarily, trip. Ruwien reds were already graceful by default, and he’d been unusually graceful on top of that, and he’d stacked on magic steroids like he expected to walk a tightrope as thin as spider webbing -

Nightmare logic doesn’t really care about ‘ordinarily’.

He trips, while he’s speaking.

Into the hole.

It's exceptionally strange, like falling through a coruscating mass of lights, like swallowing a rainbow of colors that don't exist, that're what's left when all others have been consumed and twisted into screaming shadows of themselves - that feels like mint and tastes like buzzing flies and smells like static and sounds like a thousand spiraling eyes.

There's something at the bottom. Something beautiful.

He stares.

The void stares back.

...Bina, meanwhile, finds something to anchor her scarf to.

Then jumps.

Lash tilts her head.

Smiles.

And vanishes.

Shaitiren doesn’t comment on these events, being otherwise occupied.

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful - 

She manages to knock into him! "Stop looking at the weird dream eldritch abomination - " she shouts, trying not to keep falling. Luckily the scarf is being very cooperative in length.

He blinks, when she crashes into him -

And turns into a small python, and frantically coils his way around Bina’s nearest limb.

That'd be the arm not currently clinging desperately to a magic scarf, mostly likely. 

Bina doesn't look down, but does start trying to climb.

He tentatively turns into a parrot, once she seems relatively stably positioned, and hops up on her shoulder - snakes can’t close their eyes, and he’s summarily uninterested in being further bewitched by eldritch abominations.

”... thank you,” says the parrot.

"I'm sorry about dragging you into this," she says between deep breaths. "Did not expect the eldritch abomination. At all."

“I was also not expecting the eldritch abomination,” says the bird, “but helping with this is higher leverage than almost anything I could otherwise be working on, even if I hate everything about it, and am probably going to die. Don’t worry about it.”

"I don't think we'll - die?"

She's glancing off to the side. "...Is it me or is there a door in the void."

“I was being unnecessarily pessimistic. It isn’t just you.”

There's a door.

It's simple, and much like many of the doors in Veshiri - thin, cheap metal painted a brassy color, with sharp, geometric designs.

"...I can probably swing over there. Do we want to risk - that?"

“I think that we should go through the door.”

"Right." Deep breath, and she starts to wriggle enough to swing the scarf. Not looking down's hard, but she manages - 

And the landing's only a little bit rough. She stumbles, almost falls, but catches herself.

Shaitiren flits off of her shoulder, ceases to be a bird, and tentatively tries to get a sense of their surroundings from peripheral vision, without actually looking around. 

There's a small little ledge before the door - Bina tugs at the scarf, and it returns easily to her hand, then she opens the door - 

There's a hallway beyond. Plain, with sharp lines. Nothing like Bina's memories. 

... he's not sure why he's surprised. It could've been a swirling vortex of death and that would've been mundane, at this point, but an ordinary hallway is enough to make him raise an eyebrow -

"One of us closes their eyes, other person leads?"

She's peering very suspiciously down the hallway. "That might be best. Uh, you have better ability to react to danger, I'm just - apparently my advantage is in figuring out dream logic."

“You’ve previously failed to notice situational anomalies when presented with them, so it might be better if I lead, even ignoring other factors - remember the factory? You weren’t reacting to the voices or the tiles, and then you pointed out the eldritch not-dog, but the timing didn’t really make sense for that to have been what was distracting you...”

"...Yeah. So it's probably best if you lead? Since this isn't even my memory, so I lose my advantage there." She doesn't seem particularly happy about it, though.

He’s not exactly a bundle of joy, either.

He holds her hand. He leads.

She closes her eyes.

The hallway doesn't seem to do anything weird or eldritch or dreamlike.

Except it is very, very long, and they don't seem to be getting any closer to the end. The doors along it are firmly shut and locked, and seem almost flat, like images rather than objects.

He’ll continue on for about fifteen minutes without doing anything but walk forward, if nothing else happens.

Nothing else happens in that time.

Fuck.

”Would you object to me knocking on one of those doors.”

"No. That might do something?"

“I don’t know, but it’d be a change of pace.”

He knocks on one of the doors.

It creaks open. There's a dimly lit room beyond - old furniture and sharp angles and dust.

He hadn’t expected that to work.

”... the door opened,” he reports. “No obvious horrors from beyond the void.”

She cracks one eye open. "...Still don't recognize it, though."

"I'm tempted to knock on other doors but I'm afraid that one of them actually will have an eldritch horror from beyond the void. In we go?"

"Yeah. Hopefully none of the armchairs eat us."

“I’ll warn them that I taste like burned pork and bananas, with a teaspoon of cumin. They’ll tremble in fear.”

Still holding her hand, he enters the room.

There's stuff on the floor, so Bina just keeps her gaze down. "Yuck. I wouldn't eat you with a flavor profile like that..."

The room doesn't really react to them. Small clouds of dust poof up when they move. As they enter, it becomes apparent there's two doors on the right-hand wall, dusty windows behind curtains across from them, and who knows, given dream logic the fireplace to the left could also be an exit.

He opens one of the doors. 

More dusty, abandoned house, though from the size of it it should intersect the hallway.

It's increasingly quiet. The floorboards make no noise when stepped on. The only thing audible is them. Their breath, their heartbeats, ba-dum-ba-dum-pa-ba-dum-tum. Three pulses, layered over each other.

Don’t panic. Act. He starts walking firmly towards the door to the hallway, 

“We need to leave, now,” he murmurs, quietly, “there’s someone else here -“

What door to the hallway.

Thump, thump, thump, thump.

He holds his breath, and places a force pearl in front of the open door, and in the fireplace, and in front of the window and the closed door - 

It's already here. Under them. Closer and louder.

Fuck.

Think, think, analyze your resources and follow them where they lead you -  

He doesn’t have a brick, in his pocket dimension.

He does have a polished geode, of some sentimental value.

Hello, window. Would you be so kind as to shatter and let Jamie fly through you, after hissing ‘turnintoabirdfollowme’ to Bina? You’re probably going to kill them horribly, instead, but maybe you’re feeling unusually benevolent. 

It's the void beyond, glass shattering and turning green around them, a dizzying fall - 

(Bina is flitting behind him).

He would be flying, but one of the shards of glass clipped a wing and he turned humanoid on instinct and now he’s falling, falling, falling, eyes closed, flailing on instinct - he hates this place so much -

"This might sound crazy but I think we can change what we're seeing - " Bina shouts, having also reverted. "Just - keep your eyes closed - "

Shaitiren starts absently pretending that he’s falling through a blue sky full of fluffy, fall-preventing clouds. 

“My standards for insanity have changed substantially! They’re closed.”

"It worked!" she says, laughing, "Still, don't look down, but there's more portals out now - "

“Thank the Bumbling Astronomer and his rare grace -  is it otherwise safe to open my eyes?”

"Think so!" She starts looking around for a likely landing place.

He opens his eyes, and starts doing the same thing.

(Fluffy clouds and blue sky and portals made of circular rainbows, fluffy clouds and blue sky and portals made of circular rainbows, no eldritch horrors definitely no eldritch horrors -)

Bina's possibly more imaginative - or more stubborn - than him, because they're in peppy bubble land. There's ribbons of multicolored light winding their way through the voidscape, fizzing collections of bubbles around pools of water that look very soft to land on - 

Which they do, bouncing a bit. The bubbles feel smooth to the touch, and give easily.

Peppy bubble land is personally offensive to any reasonable sense of aesthetics and - he has better things to think about.

“... thank you,” he says, tentatively standing. “The ribbons are a nice touch.”

"I wasn't picturing those! I don't know what they are..." She shakes her head. "The pools should be more like the doorway."

“The last doorway didn’t go so well.”

"Don't think it's much safer to stay here."

"Let’s take a two minute reprieve from blindly barreling through whichever exits are available without forming concrete plans, anyways. Are your mysterious dream instincts telling you that going through this door is going to get us closer to the old man, and do they include an instruction set for how we're eventually going to go back to the normal world?”

"I think waking up shouldn't be - too hard, especially once we've... There's a tension, and it'll - get easier to release once we find him? And I don't think he'll be here, which means some door, and I think the doors that go to places I don't recognize might go to his memories."

"We really should've gone through any of this beforehand. Okay. Our time to ask him questions is going to be limited; what should we prioritize?"

"What happened, and how he ended up here. 'What he knows' is relevant, but might take too long to explain."

"First we ask what he concretely knows about the eldritch horror, then we ask what happened - maybe with a clarifier like 'such that you were ensnared by the monster' so he doesn't start talking about his brother's wedding - then we ask how he ended up here, then we ask what other information he thinks is relevant... okay. Through the portal?"

"Yeah - maybe lean through to check instead of jumping through. I can do that, since I'd be able to identify my-memory or not-my-memory?"

“Yes, you can.”

"Any other thoughts before I peak through?"

“- you’ve been dealing really well with this and I’m proud of you and glad to be able to help. Nothing else.”

"...Thanks." She takes a deep breath, leans forward into the water - and back. "No dice. It's my memory. Not one that'll be - good for jumping from, I don't think."

“Have any convenient rabbits to pull out of your hat?”

"Nope. But I think we can jump to another platform."

“Or turn into birds and fly to one.”

"That too. Sorry, not used to having - magical resources."

“Neither am I, honestly. At home I used them to escape from fancy parties, not - skeletons and beautiful greenery and laundromats. Count of three, we go to that one over there?”

"Yeah."

"One... Two... Three..." And bird time!

Bird time! 

Getting to the next portal incurs no mishaps, and Bina identifies it as probably not her memory - it's definitely Veshiri, but not a street that stands out to her at all as somewhere she's been.

“I can make another pearl with a few minutes concentration. Might be safer to jump and keep one in reserve, might be safer to get a move on, might be safer to wait, let me make a new one, and fly over.”

"I think going through this one might be - best? I think - my memories aren't the way forward, here. He's unlikely to be hanging out in those."

He recalibrates his assumptions about what they’re looking for, suppresses an unhelpful comment about how this would’ve been nice to have mentioned earlier, and proceeds.

”... okay. Should I go through first, or you?”

"You seem - best able to react to weird stuff, and I lack an advantage of it being my memory."

“Okay. Anything else we should cover before I fly through?”

"Hm." She pauses, frowns, considers. "I think - I think our perceptions of things are altering them. What we believe is possible. What we believe is there. I'm not sure how actionable it is - but it's something to keep in mind."

He nods.

He turns into a bird, delicately colored and brightly feathered.

He swoops through the portal.

It's a street, the bronze towers of the city soaring above him. It's nighttime, and the yellow lamps cast a diffuse glow through the rain. There's people here, or indistinct shadows of them. 

Doing anything before Bina comes through would probably be stupid. He waits for Bina to come through.

She comes through after a very small delay - enough for him to have bailed out if something was obviously wrong.

“Lead the way?”

She looks around. "Yeah. Haven't been here, but once you're familiar with it Veshiri's not hard to navigate, just let me get my bearings..." She looks around, then gestures and sets off down the street. "Should be a major artery this way, and I'll be able to get to the laundromat from there - assuming we want to loop back there?"

"I have no idea."

"Well, I think it's our best lead for now..." She huffs, and starts walking.

He follows.

"You would know better than I."

"I think my main advantage here is being more used to guessing in this kind of weird..." she mutters. "I don't really know anything."

The street mostly behaves as they walk along it, though the edges are fuzzy and out of focus even when looked at straight on. Bina eventually gets them to the laundromat, and pauses, taking a deep breath and trying to steel her nerves.