"Well, it looks like somebody built a bar right up against the wall of an alucine," says Cayra. "The window's seriously weird, though, that I can't explain."

Evra raises an eyebrow. "Alucine?"

"A-lu-cine," she repeats slowly and clearly.

"I don't know what that is," Evra admits.

Evra hums and sets his glass of wine down. "I'm not from your world."

"Apparently not. Um, but how did you get here?"

He nods at the door. "The same way you did." Assuming, of course, that was the only way into the bar.

"That's... strange." She goes over to the door and peeks out. There is a little low-tech village outside. "That's exactly where I came in from. Which, incidentally, is in an alucine."

"What is an alucine, anyway?"

"A place where there is stuff. Do you maybe just have a different word for them, or come from a really, really big one...?"

How helpful. "Could you be more specific?"

"I would but I'm trying to imagine what you could possibly have instead of alucines and I'm really low on ideas. An alucine is an... area. With edges. Linked to other alucines by portals."

"Physical portals, like doorways? Or shortcuts through space?"

"Well, when I said this was cunning what I meant was that it was clever to have a door over a portal. But... the second thing. I think. That's a really weird way to put it, 'through space', portals are more of a between alucines thing than a within alucines thing. I'm not actually sure off the top of my head if you can make one that shortcuts through space."

Interesting. "How big are your alucines, on average?"

"Like, average average, or typical, or average inhabited, or typical inhabited?"

Evra shrugs. "All of the above, I suppose."

"I don't have exact figures. Your standard inhabited alucine will have, like, two towns and a swath of farm, or a big city. They come in very small - too small for some people to fit into all the way - and in very large - several continents and oceans - but there's more tiny ones than big ones, the big ones are just more interesting."

"What does the edge of an alucine look like? Do they come with portals, or do you make them?"

"They look like... they don't look like anything? If you're painting scenery that includes a wall you just paint sky color there, so it depends on whether it's night or day, I guess. And there's naturally occurring portals but some 'mancers learn to make them."

Evra tries to wrap his head around the idea of living in pockets of space rather than one continuous plot of earth and fails. "Let me reword that. If you were to walk all the way to the end of an alucine, do you hit a wall? Does the ground just stop existing?"

"Yeah, you hit a wall. There's no dirt past the edge - well, if you really want to you can pile up a bunch of dirt against a wall and leave it there and then dig it away and come away with slightly more than you started with? But, like, there isn't anything past the walls."

"So, this bar seems to work like an alucine... albeit with a funky window... but where are you from?"