He parks. "Gonna get you into the Avalon and cover things up with the force, okay? You stay in there if you can't look all human."

She hasn't had nightmares like this but only because her nightmares aren't this creative. Well. They still can't trap her; if it's awful she can fly south and live in a tree and maybe it will be horrible but at least it'll be a different kind of horrible. She gets out of the car.

He shows her through a door and past a guard and into a little village in a warehouse concatenated with other warehouses. There are pretend stars on the ceiling, and all kinds of cryptid- and not-quite-cryptid-people are wandering around.

The cryptids are kind of alarming. She hangs back watchfully.

"Hi Gene," says somebody who is maybe not past the cryptid threshold towards being a lion but is sure flirting with it.

"Hey Vince. This girl showed up in the station, I'm not sure what her deal is but I got her out before anybody panicked enough to shoot her, can you see about getting her a bed for the night and so on?" Gene says.

"Yeah, all right," says Vince, and they fistbump temporarily pawed hands and Gene waves goodbye.

"Hey there," says Vince. "I'm Gene's cousin, Vince. What's your name? What are you?"

Dusk. She's a magical girl. She's pretty sure that works differently from his thing, this seems to be a different world than the one she's from.

"...well, that's exciting, then," he says. "I'm a Nemean lion. Basically a lion, but cooler. How's your thing work?"

She got magic last spring, it lets her shapeshift and change her clothes. She has to look a certain amount far from being human, if she tries to look like a normal human it just doesn't work. She can't change too far from being human, either, though, or she'll turn into a cryptid - cryptids are only maybe people and definitely not the people they were before; she's not going to do that. How he looks right now is about where she'd expect a magical girl to start being a cryptid if they did it. She also has two spells, the one she's using to talk and one that lets her make cartoon things that work like real ones; every magical girl gets different spells.

"Huh! How about that. It's different all right. This is still the right place for you though."

All right.

She's going to put her stuff back on now if that's okay, it's kind of uncomfortable not having her body how she's used to.

"Sure, you can be in whatever form suits your boots, 'round here."

All right.

Antennae. Inlays. Tattoos. Swap the wings. She loses the jacket and gives her shirt longer sleeves, adjusting the ruffles at the shoulders to accommodate them; swaps the jeans for leggings again but makes them a little thicker against the chill and adds legwarmers in orange-streaked silver-blue.

"That's pretty neato," he says.

The tiniest smile: Yeah. She's really glad she got magic.

"There's not a real hotel," he says. "Monsters - that's people who can't look human, there's folks trying to push other words but they haven't caught on yet - mostly don't travel even between Avalons, and folks who can pass just use regular hotels. But there's folks with spare rooms and we can ask 'em if you can stay at least for now."

She doesn't actually need a bed, just someplace warm enough and safe; the spell that makes things can do a bed or a hammock or whatever.

"Oh, well, it stays warm in here and I don't think you'd need to worry about it and you won't get snowed on. I can show you the park."

Thanks.

"You're welcome."

The park has a big pond and a little treed area with benches.

She finds a flat spot and puts a tent on it.

Will people worry if she makes herself a campfire later? Cartoon fire can't burn real things but of course they won't know that.

"Nobody's going to know that, yeah, and there's rules against fires in here, we're decently ventilated but not to the point where you want smoke. Better not."

All right.

Is there anything else she should know?

"Uh, let me show you where I live and in the morning you can come by and we'll get breakfast, all right? And - what was your name again, harder to remember when I didn't quite hear it exactly -"

She usually sleeps really late, but she'll come by when she wakes up, sure, probably more like lunchtime though. And her name is Dusk, like her outfit theme.

"Dusk. Pretty. All right, I'll try to be home all morning." He points out his house. "I live there. When I'm staying in the Avalon; sometimes I don't."