"What happened three or four hours ago?"

She would have handled the thing with the Bakers differently if she'd known just how stuck she is.

It's still only maybe a disaster and would only have been a different kind of disaster if she'd done it differently but it would have bought her a little more time before the disaster part hit, probably. (Sigh.)

"Ah. I'm sorry."

It's not her fault.

"Still. Anyway, I'm gonna go home, do you need anything?"

She should be okay. Uh - if she gives May a few pearls now, like a couple dozen, will she have time to take them to a pawn shop tomorrow, or will she be too busy with the magic?

"I can take a break to pawn them, it won't take that long I think."

Thanks.

She gets a distant look, and rows of pearls appear set into her arm - white, baby blue, deep oil-slick indigo, shimmery sea green, buttery gold, a dozen perfect fingernail-sized orbs of each, and she picks them out and puts them in matching cartoon bags, smoothing out the indents in her arm after each row.

"That doesn't hurt or anything?"

Nope. It feels a little weird, but that's all, they're not attached or anything.

"Gosh. Okay. Will this bag continue existing when it's far away from you and you're asleep and stuff? I should probably rebag them anyway."

Yeah. If she makes a bunch of stuff all at once the older things start disappearing but she doesn't expect to have any reason to do that.

"Got it."

So, she'll see her in a couple days then. Thanks again for everything.

"See you." And May departs with pearls.

The lights are still up; she wants to go poke around the ceiling, but, later, when she won't be so easy to spot. For now, she heads back to the library to return the book and look up pearls.

Pearls are expensiveish, rarer ones more so, natural uncultured ones even more so.

And the good colors are like so, and the green ones she gave May are a color that doesn't actually exist naturally, oops. At least the indigo and gold ones should get a nice price, if they don't completely rip May off Dusk will be fine for food for a while. Figuring out how to sell them is harder, and she doesn't get anywhere on it before getting too frustrated to continue.

She checks out Creatures and Cryptids and heads back to the park.

There's nobody there except some aquatics hanging out by the shore, half in and half out of the water.

She makes herself a chair and sits and reads, but she can't really get into it.

The sun'll be setting, now, and she can't see it.

She might never get to see a sunset again.

She's panicky, all of a sudden. She curls up tight in her chair, book pressed to her chest, and tries to just breathe.

The ceiling lights turn off. The fake stars turn on.

That really doesn't help.

She pulls herself together, though, after a while. She can do this. She doesn't want to but she doesn't have to want to, she just has to do it.

She tucks the book away in the crook of a branch in her tree, and flies up to have a closer look at the roof, particularly around the edges.

Up close, it's a roof. The lights are electric; big lamps for the fake sun, little fairylights for the stars. There are vents, up high in the walls.

She makes herself a platform to stand on and takes a closer look at one of the vents. Could she take the cover off and wiggle through, if that was something she needed to do to get out? Does it seem like it leads right to the outside, or is there some depth to the wall she'd have to deal with?

It requires unscrewing. There's a little depth to the wall, enough that she can't see out, but it's not a whole ductwork system. There is a fan in there, turning slowly.