It's so rude! And yet, here she is in what, judging by the French on the signage, is Canada.

It's a little wintrier than it was when she left, but maybe that's just because it's Canada?

- French. Okay.

She gets out of the way of the sidewalk's foot traffic and quickly designs herself a jacket - puffy metallic blue, with indigo ruffles at the hem and covering the sleeves and sunset pink piping in the stitching on the body of it. Her legs are getting cold, too, and her wings, so she swaps her leggings for her old jean design and her wings for her owl ones. That done, she comes out of starscape to look around some more.

People are staring at her like they've never seen a magical girl before.

- um?

She's sorry, is something wrong?

That's even more startling! People start backing away from her!

What.

She's not dangerous, she's just lost. Can they point her to where a lost kid should go for help around here?

"Are you an alien?" asks a little girl.

No, she's a magical girl. Do they not have those here, somehow? She's pretty sure there are magical girls everywhere.

"Only on TV," says the little girl. "And they don't have bug parts."

"Ginny!" says the little girl's mother. "Shhh!"

It's fine, she's not offended, just very confused.

She still needs to know where to go for help, can she tell her?

"If you need help you go find a police officer," says little Ginny.

Sigh.

All right, she'll do that, then.

She takes off, flying over the center of the street, gaining altitude. She'll take a police station if she spots one, or a church, or anything else likely-looking.

People point and stare at her the entire way there. There are churches - Christian ones, one synagogue, a mosque - and yep there's a police station.

She'll take whatever she comes to first. Hanging around attracting attention sounds like a good way to get in a fight with an airplane or something.

This Catholic church is first.

She swoops down and pauses to listen for a service in progress.

Yup, evening Mass.

Interrupting that wouldn't make a good first impression. She flies on, looking for the next thing to fit the bill.

The synagogue is quiet, but also locked and empty.

...one more try and then she'll go back to the first one.

Police station's open! People are still looking at her. Taking pictures.

Camera flashes are deeply unpleasant; she shields herself with her wings as she heads inside.

The police don't know what to make of her either and one draws a gun.

She puts her hands up. And phases out.

"What the hell is that?" one cop asks another cop.

"Never seen anything like it before."

"Do we shoot it?"

"Got its hands up."

"That a no?"

"It's a no! Moron!"

She is lost and needs help that is what police are supposed to be for. (Her hands stay up.)

"It's telepathic!" yelps a cop.

"No shit it's telepathic, what is it??" says another one.

"An alien!" suggests a cop. "You a lost alien?"

She's a magical girl. It's not a big deal where she's from but she's very lost. Could that one guy stop pointing the gun at her, please.

"Where you from, Japan?" says one.

"I am resisting the telepathic suggestion!" announces the guy with the gun as though this is a tremendous effort.

"They don't have those in Japan! Moron!" someone replies to the first.

She's from Massachusetts. Just, Massachusetts with magical girls. A magic monster ate her and now she's here.

"- Guys," says a cop, "uh, I think I got this - I, uh - I dunno what her deal is but I know a guy?"

"You know a guy, Gene?"

"Yeah, I know a guy, lemme take her to my guy, okay?"

None of the cops have an obviously better idea.

Sure. She'll go with the guy who knows a guy.

Guy who knows a guy asks her if she can look any less conspicuous on the way to his guy.

She'd really rather not. She can if it's very important though.

"Just till we get there. I can put you in a shock blanket for the wings, I guess."

Magical girls shapeshift, she can get rid of the wings. Can't look all the way human, though, and if she gets too close she loses the telepathy until she changes back. She'll still understand him but she can't talk the regular way.

"- okay. Blanket and fix your - colors and the antennae to look human?" He fetches her a blanket.

Yeah, that works.

The antennae go first, and then the metal insets - she adds jewelry, instead, bangle bracelets and ear cuffs and rings and a large enamel moth pin on her jacket, and then she tries a few different hats before settling on an oversized velvet beanie in indigo-to-black ombre with embroidered stars and swirls. Once that's done, the tattoos go, and she swaps wings again, considers, and puts the owl wings back, slightly smaller.

He drapes her in the blanket. "This way," he says, and he leads her out of the police station, through the back door, into a car.

...attempts to lead her into a car. Uh. This was badly planned.

She has a thing about being strapped down, she will be okay being in the car if the ride is quick but she's definitely not putting a seat belt on.

"I don't think it'd work with your midform there anyway - just lie across the backseat," Gene says.

She can do that. Her what? She doesn't know that word.

"The shape you're in right now? More human than not but still not?"

He's maybe confused about how her shapeshifting works but okay. (She gets in.)

When she's situated he starts driving. "I don't know what species you are, I don't know what your details are."

She's a human. Her world doesn't have other species besides humans and animals.

"You're obviously not a human, kiddo."

If you want to count magical girls as a separate thing then she's that and not human but her parents were regular humans and if she has a kid the kid will most likely be a regular human and that's what being a species means.

"My mom's a human. I dunno what the scientists'd call us."

Whatever.

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."

All right. Thanks.

"You're welcome. Sleep well."

And off he goes.

She only spends a few minutes in her tent before she starts feeling like she can't breathe. She dismisses it, flaps up into a tree, finds it a little better, and curls up in a hammock to sleep.

Fake stars twinkle at her all night until abruptly the lighting changes into faux daylight.

That wakes her; she was sleeping poorly anyway. She's disoriented, and then distressed - it was real. She really is trapped here.

She stays in her hammock for a while, curled up in a ball, miserable.

The town wakes up around her. Some people apparently live in the pond; a few of them breach playfully, and one beaches herself, divides her tail into legs, and walks down the street.

That's not interesting enough to get her to do much more than note it, right now.

A family of centaurs has a picnic breakfast in the park; they don't notice her and eventually they leave again.

Yeah, she'll have to get down and eat eventually. Eventually isn't yet, though.

A girl with barely any nonhuman features rolls up in a wheelchair to sit in the park with a book and read.

That does get her attention, a little. She watches.

The book is significant fractions weird line art. She takes a lot of notes.

Math or something, maybe.

She's not ready to deal with people yet, not even really ready to leave the tree, but she does uncurl a bit.

The girl hears her, looks up, blinks, goes back to her book and notetaking.

She hangs out in the tree for another ten or fifteen minutes, then glides down to sit at the base of it.

"Hi. I've never seen you before."

Yeah, she's new, she just got here last night.

"Whoa. Uh, is that send-only?"

She curls up a little more tightly: Yeah.

"Just checking. I didn't know there were telepathic critters. What are you?"

She's a magical girl. She's from a different world; a cryptid ate her and now she's here. Her thing works differently from their thing.

"- ooh! What can you tell me about your world?"

It seems to be pretty much like this one except for having magical girls in it and probably not critters; the languages and architecture and clothes and things are all the same. Magical girls just sort of happen; they run in families but only a little bit. They aren't secret or anything, just a little bit rare. All magical girls can shapeshift; she can look however she wants except she can't look too human and looking too far from human is dangerous. And magical girls get spells; she has the telepathy and one that makes cartoon things and her grownups have water magic and force magic and she knows people who have art and fire and healing and different kinds like that.

"...that's really cool! Do you want to go home? I'm studying magic. I can't promise anything but I could try."

That gets her attention. Yes, she would very much like to go home.

"Cool, I can work on that. It... might not work, I don't know of runecasting ever being used to send people between worlds on account of I didn't know there were other worlds, but it's a pretty flexible system."

Even just a chance is important.

(And, now she's crying a little.)

"- you okay?"

Not really.

She hates being trapped.

"Avalon's not big enough?"

She's not even sure how big it is but she knows she can't leave.

She's had people take pictures of her because she's a magical girl before but she's never had someone point a gun at her about it.

"Oh, yikes. That explains the news this morning, I guess. Uh, if you've urgently got to get out, I can cast an invisibility spell. It doesn't last that long but it's enough to fly around a little, get some air."

She thinks she will be okay right now - knowing she could go helps a lot, and she's still a little wrung out from last night, she wouldn't be able to enjoy it properly - but she will probably want to actually go at some point. Thanks.

"You're welcome."

Her name is Dusk, by the way. Dusk Glory.

"May Swan, pleased to meet you."

So what is the avalon like, anyway? She got here really late last night, she hasn't seen much of it.

"It's basically just a small town where all the people who can't look human live and some of the people who can do too, and lots more who live in human spaces hang out. I don't live here myself. Other than the species composition and people knowing about magic it's pretty conventional, honestly."

Are there any places she should know about or anything?

"There's a little library, there's a lot of restaurants - a lot of the houses and apartments in Avalons don't have full kitchens, to save space, so people eat out a lot - I'm trying to think what the best way to keep you fed while you're stuck here is, I have some money but not like a lot -"

The lion guy who showed her the park last night was going to get her breakfast. And she can probably get a job, her second spell is really good and she can make organic things by shapeshifting, some magical girls make money that way. Or modeling but she doesn't really want to do that.

"I don't think modeling would work here anyway. The spell idea could work, if people aren't offput about child labor, what-all does it do?"

It makes things. Whatever things she wants. Complicated electronics don't work - a lamp does but a TV doesn't - and things with information on them don't work if they're too complicated - like a book - or work weirdly if they're less complicated - like a deck of cards - but simple enough things, like a sign, are fine. And things with moving parts stop working if she stops paying attention to them, but they also are - friendlier? Like she never learned to ride a real bike but she can ride a cartoon bike just fine, and she has trouble holding small things but cartoon things just stay in her hands anyway, and cartoon fire doesn't burn real things or go anywhere she doesn't want it to.

"Huh, that's really cool! I'm not immediately sure how you'd monetize it, there's not going to be a classified ad saying 'wanted: cartoon objects', but I'll keep an eye out."

At home she used it a lot for things like ladders, where you only need them once in a while for a few minutes and they just take up space in a closet the rest of the time. Or things that are too big to be worth keeping around for the few times you need them, or too hard to move to be practical, or things like that. Sometimes for specialty tools, too, like, if there's an exact kind of kitchen tool that would do a particular job it's probably not worth getting it to use it once, but she can just look at a picture and make one for five minutes.

Probably the easiest way to do it is just let people know what she can do and let them come find her when they want stuff.

"Yeah, okay, the lion guy can get you breakfast and I can cover your lunch and dinner today if he won't, and get an ad in the paper tomorrow morning."

That sounds good. She should figure out where she's going to be, first, too - she'll probably be hanging out in this tree a lot but she doesn't want people looking for her there all the time.

"Hmm, good point. If you want to sleep outdoors-as-the-Avalon-gets the park is the place for it but you could sit at one of the tables people eat at on Main Street during the day?"

Yeah, that should work. And just give a description of herself - she can change stuff around a little if 'the moth girl in the sunset themed outfit' isn't distinct enough.

"That's plenty distinct, I don't think we have any moth-y species at least around here."

Cool.

May has been really helpful, she appreciates it.

"You're welcome! Maybe one day I will be able to visit your world and you can pay me back by showing me around."

That would be good. It really is mostly the same but they won't have Thaumatology churches here and those are so pretty.

"There are some pretty churches, but we don't have that denomination."

Yeah, Thaumatology is - she's been keeping this a little bit secret, but the thing that determines how much magic she has and how good it is is how pretty she is. Which is a little weird, but all magical girls work that way, and some of them think that the thing that decides how pretty they are is a goddess. She's not sure, the rest of the world doesn't seem like it was made by someone who cares a lot about how pretty things are, but there definitely is something deciding it, it's not just what she thinks looks good. And Thaumatology is the church for that goddess, so of course they're as pretty as they can be.

"That's interesting. There's nothing like that here - there's magic but it's pretty mechanistic except for natural language interpretation, which I don't think requires a deity to explain."

Yeah. Magical girls are the only thing she's heard of that really sounds like there might be a god behind it.

Do critters tend to be Christian or anything?

"Some of them are, there's a nondenominational church, but there's not an overwhelming skew or anything."

That's good. People can be weird about it when they think their religion is the only real one.

"I find that most religious people think that."

Yeah. But it's better, at least, when they know other people who believe other things just as much. They'll think they're wrong but they won't think they don't exist and they won't be as upset when they meet someone who believes another different thing.

"Are there people in your world who believe that they belong to the only religion on the planet?"

Not - exactly? But Christians are common enough that a lot of them don't know anybody who isn't, and it does surprise them to find out someone's not, and they aren't always good about it.

"Fair enough. Does your world have the same countries as here?"

She hasn't had a chance to check yet. United States Canada Mexico Panama?

"Yes."

Where is she, anyway, she hasn't had a chance to ask.

"Toronto Canada."

Explains the cold. She's from Massachusetts, maybe half an hour's flight from Boston.

"I'd offer to get you there but there wouldn't be as much point. At least we speak English here, huh?"

Yep. Her telepathy works fine on people who don't but she'd still be in some trouble if she couldn't understand anyone.

"You'd have to guess and check a whole lot, yeah, and it would have been harder for somebody to whisk you away into an Avalon."

She probably would have ended up getting shot, and then who knows what would have happened.

"It'd depend where you landed. Most of the world is ocean, for one thing, could you shift enough to live in the ocean for a while?"

- probably. Maybe not well, though, she'd be real nervous about doing gills and a mermaid tail at the same time.

"That must be a frustrating line to walk."

It's easier at home, people have figured out how risky different things are and she can look it up.

"Oh, that makes sense."

Yeah. She does know some things - she doesn't have the numbers all memorized but there are a lot of things that she knows are less expensive than wings, or less than half as expensive - but she's never wanted to be a mermaid.

"Reasonable enough. Not all the mermaids even want to be mermaids."

That sounds rough, if they can only be the one thing.

"They can be humans, more or less. With a medallion, or if they're born human shaped and never get one."

Huh. How does that work?

She tugs the chain of her own medallion. "These are enchanted. For a lot of critter species - though not all, there's some who are stuck and there's some who can shapeshift on their own - what happens is, they spend a lot of time looking human to pass outside the Avalon, and if they have kids while they're doing that, the kids look human from birth. Later the kids can use medallions to gain the ability to turn into whatever they really are under the spell, but if they don't they can still pass it on quietly for generations so sometimes there's a surprise in a family that doesn't remember being critters at all anymore. Other critters have kids while they're shaped like critters, and those kids are born in critter form and need medallions to look human."

That sounds like it's pretty convenient.

She doesn't know if this is rude to ask but she's curious what kind of critter May is, now.

"Wyvern. I don't go fullform much, what with the wheelchair and the lack of hands, but -" She kicks out a foot, and it goes blue-scaled and clawful.

Neat.

"I think so!" She puts her foot back to normal.

Magical girls do scales sometimes. They're a little expensive, but not so much that you can't do that and wings - one of the girls at one of the churches they visited when they were on vacation over the summer had black opalescent scales all over, like this, she was just gorgeous.

"Ooh, that's nice!"

Yeah. Hopefully May will get to go see for herself, someday.

"I look forward to it!"

She's getting a little hungry, she should go get breakfast. She'll come find May again after?

"Sure, I'll be here all day!"

All right!

And off she goes to Vince's house.

Vince answers the door. "Morning, Dusk! - heh, that's a little funny."

Yeah, it is, a little. Good morning to him, too.

"What d'you want for breakfast?"

Whatever's easy is fine, she's not picky.

"Okay, let's go to Polly's, I could go for an omelette."

She follows amicably.

Polly's does omelettes and pancakes and toast and waffles and French toast with various toppings, and sides of sausage and bacon and fruit and oatmeal and yogurt.

She looks the menu over and puts in an order for waffles with scrambled eggs and sausage.

Vince orders a ham and cheese omelette and soon their food appears.

Om nom.

So, is there anything she should know about the avalon or anything?

"Uh, if you're stuck here we probably wanna find a monster family for you to live with, yeah? So you'll have somebody looking after you."

She's willing to meet people but she's pretty picky about grownups, she might rather just get a job and live by herself.

"How old are you?"

Thirteen; fourteen soon. But she's an independent sort, and smart, and her magic is really good; she'll probably be okay.

"It's pretty safe in the Avalon but I still don't know about a fourteen year old living by herself."

Well, she's willing to meet people, maybe there'll be someone she likes.

"Earlier I dropped a note at the council office about you. Haven't heard back."

All right. She'll be fine in the park for now and she has a couple of ideas for things she could do to earn money for food, there's no rush.

"That's good. What're your ideas?"

She can make organic things with her shapeshifting, to sell - pretty feathers or horns or scales or wool or whatever, things that are easy to take off. She doesn't know if people would be interested in that here but magical girls at home do it sometimes. The other thing she could do, which seems like it'd work better here, is make cartoon things for people - she was talking to someone in the park earlier who mentioned that homes here don't have a lot of space, so maybe people would like being able to pay her a little bit of money for a ladder that lasts a day and then disappears instead of needing to be stored, or a fancy kitchen gadget for a special meal they only want a few times a year, or whatever.

"Oh, huh, equipment rentals might work."

Mmhmm. She can't do complicated electronics - like, she can make them, but they don't work - but she can do most tools, it's not even hard.

"Are drills complicated? Stud finders? I can never find my stud finder."

Drills aren't. She doesn't know what a stud finder is.

"It's a thing for finding the parts of a wall you can anchor stuff on."

She'd have to see at least a picture and probably a video of someone using one. If it has a computer in it at all it's too complicated, though.

"Don't think it has."

She'll look it up and give it a try, then.

"That might not pay off right away, I don't know if I'd remember to find you next time I needed a stud finder. Or, well, maybe I would for that, but I'd forget if it was something else."

Well, if she's living in the park and only needs money for food she won't need very much money, probably.

"Yeah, that's true. I'm not positive if you're allowed to live in the park."

Mm. Well, she'll wait and see.

"It's just I think if it were allowed somebody'd probably be doing it already, see?"

Most people can't get comfortable in a park as easily as she can, but yeah, that makes sense.

"It's not like a normal park, it doesn't rain or get too cold 'cause we're indoors however they fiddle with the ceiling."

The ground's still ground, though, and there's no place to keep things if you have things to keep.

Doesn't really matter; if it's not allowed it's not allowed and she'll figure something else out.

"The council'll get to me today about it most likely."

All right.

Does he know if they're going to try to make her go to school?

"There's a school here, yeah."

Okay.

"It's mostly for monster kids after they get to be about ten years old, since the others can go to normal school once they get their medallions."

All right.

"I was born human so I don't know much about it, sorry."

That's all right.

They can talk about something else now.

"Yeah, okay. Do you need anything like a change of clothes or a toothbrush or whatever?"

She's going to want a shower eventually, but she's good for everything else, she can just make it.

"There's a little gym, it's got a shower and it's public. The taxes to live here are wild, and then even wilder 'cause the monsters get subsidies, so it all winds up falling on people like me, but we got you covered."

Thanks.

"You want me to show you where it is?" he asks, when he's finished his omelette.

Sure, that sounds good.

He shows her the gym, which is very small and not at all designed to be appealing from the perspective of a pedestrian walking by. He points through the entrance to the sign indicating where the showers are.

Cool. Is there anything else that she should know where it is? If there's a library she could find out whether she can make a studfinder that works.

"There is, it's just down this way -" He shows her the library.

Are there computers? Can she just use one?

There are two and she can, only one is in use at the moment.

She brings up google, and - she's bad with words, can he type it in for her?

"...okay, just this once. Use the telepathy all the time and it makes you rusty? You oughta brush up."

Nope, she has a disability, she's never been able to remember words right. It was pretty awful before she got the magic.

"Wow, huh."

Yup. So, video - that definitely looks too complicated for her magic, with the screen and all. She'll double-check wikipedia to be sure, though... hm, she could maybe rig something up, magnets are usually fine, but she'd have to know more about how it works. Which is always fun to learn about; he should check next time he needs one whether she's figured it out.

"Sure thing."

Cool. Anything else?

"I think that's all. You think you can find your way back to the park from here okay?"

Mmhmm. She might look around a little but she'll be either here or there for most of the day, she thinks.

"Cool. Let me know if you need anything else!" And he lets himself out.

While she's got the computer right here, what does the news have to say about last night?

An extremely realistic cosplayer of a character from an obscure webcomic with two hastily doodled installments alarmed people last night! The character is telepathic, but of course the real incident was just mimicking telepathy with a cunning audio trick, the details of which are unfortunately too proprietary for the reporters to have gotten ahold of. (The webcomic character's name is "Rheeba".)

That's hilarious. She wonders what they would have done if someone had gotten pictures of her flying.

She's going to need an email account, if she's stuck here and people she wants to talk to aren't - it's going to be a pain and a half getting something set up to let her reply, but one-way communication is better than none at all. RheebaTheMoth@gmail.com is free; she claims it.

That's all she needs from the internet right now; she finds the librarian, explains her situation, and asks if they have any recommendations for what she should read to learn about this world.

"Gosh, I guess you'd need about the same things as any new turned critter, wouldn't you?" She has a standard list for that: Creatures and Cryptids (they use the word differently here), Welcome to Avalon, and Medallion Magic.

Welcome to Avalon sounds like the place to start; can she check it out or does she need to do something special to get a library card?

She can get a library card pretty easily.

Welcome to Avalon is about Avalons generically but it's a cheery introduction to the town-within-a-town setup and has fun facts (fun fact: the pond is probably inhabited! fun fact: the Internet has improved the economic situation of monsters very greatly, and before that, phones did the same thing! fun fact: some of the magic used to create the conveniences of some Avalons is lost now!)

She doesn't do much more than skim it before heading back to the park.

May's still there, eating some takeout sushi.

Hi!

"Hi! I didn't know when you were coming back so I got lunch without you but let me know whenever you're hungry."

She might skip it, anyway, she usually only eats twice a day. Thanks, though.

They're probably going to try to make her have grownups and go to school, that's going to be a mess.

"I can see why it would be a mess, yeah. What time of year is it at home for you?"

Late January.

"Well, that's no good, I would have said you should claim you deserve the rest of your summer vacation if it'd been summer. I mean, I suppose you could lie."

She'll be a little surprised if it works but it's worth a try, anyway, yeah.

"It might not work but it might also buy you another week of Council debate, and if I can make a spell to get you home work at all it won't take me more than a month, so a week's something."

Oh, that's awesome, she wasn't expecting it to be so fast.

Does May have an idea of how likely it is she'll be able to get it to work? 

"I don't have a good estimate. Uh, drawing it alone might eat a day, I'm guessing it has to have a lot of oomph to do what we want it to do and that means it has to be big."

She can be patient, that's not the problem; if May is pretty sure she can do it than Dusk will mostly worry about being okay in the short term and if it's a longshot then she'll be more careful about setting things up so she'll be okay if it fails.

"I'm pretty sure I can do it if runecasting can do it. I just don't know if runecasting can do it."

- sorry. She didn't mean she thinks May is bad at it, she's just trying to plan.

"Yeah, I know, I'm just trying to explain why I don't have a better estimate for you. It's probably safest to assume you're stuck here, unfortunately."

All right. She can do that.

Vince expects to hear back from the council sometime today; she'll have a better idea of what's going on after that.

"Yeah. I dunno exactly how they'll react but finding you grownups and putting you in school is a safe bet. Uh - please don't go around saying I said I could get you home. People generally think magic is incredibly dangerous and I have private reasons to believe I can do it anyway."

Sure, she can do that. She hasn't told anybody about May yet anyway.

"Thanks."

May finishes her sushi and goes back to working on her runecasting.

If Vince hasn't shown up by the time she's done with her book, she'll move a little way off and start setting up an elaborate marble run.

Vince shows up when she is putting the first marble down the run. "Hey there Dusk!" he says. "Heard from the Council. They want to put you with Mr. and Mrs. Baker - they're a manticore and a Celean harpy respectively, with two grownup kids. One kid's still living at home but he can move in with a buddy to free up the room for ya."

Well, she said she'd meet them, lead the way. (She dismisses the marble run.)

"Sure thing, this way."

Chez Baker is a rowhouse. Mr. Baker is a cherry-red lion-monster with half a bright blue pool noodle attached to his tail by rubber bands. Mrs. Baker is a hunched scary-looking individual with four sets of wings - two small bird ones below and in front of two large bat ones - clawed bird legs, a bird tail, and an apron that says KISS THE COOK TO RECEIVE BROWNIES. The kid who's home is the same species as Mr. Baker and he's clearing out his stuff from his room.

She does her best not to stare; it's pretty good.

Hi; has she been explained to them?

"Yes, dear," croaks Mrs. Baker. "You must have had such an awful shock appearing here of a sudden."

Yeah. Cryptids are usually pretty safe; she hopes that one doesn't eat too many more people before they figure out what to do with her.

"I hope so too," says Mrs. Baker. "Do you want to come in? The popovers are just about to come out of the oven."

Sure. 

Mrs. Baker takes the popovers out with her bare claws, stabs each one with her thumb, and offers one to Dusk wrapped in a napkin so she can hold it without getting burned.

Okay. She blows on it and takes a bite.

So, uh, what are the Bakers like?

"Well," says Mr. Baker, taking his own popover in a massive paw, "we're homebodies, I suppose, which is just as well since we can't exactly go out and about, we'd cause car accidents! I do phone tech support and my wife here sold a cookbook, and sometimes sells crochet patterns. We like theater - I mean we can't go to the theater but we can get recordings in, is what I mean."

"And music," says Mrs. Baker. "Orchestras are my favorite."

Theater's nice; her school has an after-school thing with a theater group.

"That's lovely! The school here puts on little plays sometimes," says Mrs. Baker.

That's cool.

How, uh - how firm are they on her going to school, rather than studying on her own or something?

"The school is there for a reason," says Mr. Baker.

Sure. Doesn't work for her, though.

"What's that supposed to mean?" he asks.

She flinches.

"Whoa there," he says. "What's that for?"

She takes a second to relax, very obviously.

She can't talk without her magic, and she only got her magic not even a year ago. She grew up in an institution, and it was horrible, and she doesn't do well with being trapped places, now, or with people trying to make her do things, or with people being angry. She's only sort of handling being trapped in the Avalon; if they try to stick her in a regular classroom right now she gives it maybe a week before she goes cryptid. If she even cooperates enough to let them, which she wouldn't, because she doesn't want to die.

"- go cryptid?" says Mrs. Baker.

"Monsters don't get a ton of options!" says the manticore kid, walking by. His tail is wrapped in bandages rather than the pool noodle option. "We just have to suck it up!"

Kids are like that sometimes, doesn't mean anything, she can ignore him. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.

Yeah. Cryptids - her world's kind - are what happens when a magical girl changes to look too far from human. They might be people, it's hard to tell, but they definitely aren't the same people they were before. Suicide, basically, except it's easy and painless and nobody can stop you. She likes the part where nobody can stop you; she doesn't want that but there are plenty of things in the world that she wants even less.

The Bakers look at each other.

Mrs. Baker says, "I don't think we're the right place for you to find your feet here, but would you like another popover while we go tell the council?"

Sure. Thanks.

Dusk gets another popover. The kid is annoyed about having been encouraged to move out when they're not going to keep her after all, and there is a brief confused argument about whether he should move back in.

She heads back to the park - flies, this time, lands in her tree again.

"Not a fan of the Bakers?"

Didn't go well, yeah. Generally won't; she has some pretty good reasons for being picky about grownups. She was really lucky with her first set.

"Working on it. Uh, if you avoid letting any locals get real attached to you I won't feel so conflicted about disappearing you from 'em."

She snorts: Yeah, that's probably not going to be a problem.

"I'd try to get you put with my mom, she's pretty easygoing and I can talk her into stuff decently well, but she doesn't live in the Avalon."

...that might well be better than staying here. The size of the place doesn't matter that much for how trapped she feels, what the people running it are like does, and the council just tried to assign her to some adults without even looking at her first.

"I can think of worse reasons to announce that I have a functioning invisibility spell but Ren's place is really very small and she likes having people over."

Ah. Well, thanks anyway.

"Sorry. I don't really know anyone here very well either, to recommend."

Yeah. Well. See what they come up with this time, she guesses.

"Good luck."

Thanks.

"Coming up on dinnertime," May says a long while later.

Yeah.

She's not picky; whatever May wants is fine. (She glides down.)

"Lasagna special it is." May rolls down the street; she mostly propels her chair with her feet rather than grabbing the wheels.

Dusk walks nearby; she's switched back to her moth wings. She gawks at the architecture a little.

There is a place with a lasagna special, which May orders, but Dusk has her choice of generic American or Americanized foods.

"The restaurants here are cheap," May says. "I asked and apparently most Avalons don't make restaurants pay rent as long as you can get a square meal there for little enough money, because it'd be so space inefficient for everyone to have kitchens and they want it to work for most people to not have to have kitchens, or to be able to share one kitchen for a whole block."

(Third entree is.... grilled cheese. She gets that.)

That's clever. And convenient.

"Also more money flows into the Avalon if people who don't live here spend at the restaurants and we're more likely to do that if it's cheap as well as convenient. Some of the houses have kitchens anyway but they go to people who actually like cooking. The whole thing's very planned economy, but the Avalons are small enough it basically works?"

What's wrong with that kind of thing usually? Just that it's too hard to make a plan for something too complicated?

"Something like that. I think I need to read more economics than I've gotten around to so far to explain it but it's something like that."

Okay. She hasn't learned about economics at all yet, maybe she'll see if the library has anything on it.

"My to-read list has some books on it but since I haven't read it yet I don't know if any of it's good, you might as well just start with Wikipedia."

Yeah, that too. Books are easier to learn from, though, it's hard to find Wikipedia articles that don't assume you already know what they're talking about when it's a complicated subject.

"Yeah, but if you want something broad like 'economics' it's a good place to start."

Yeah, that's true.

"So tonight when I get home I'm going to plug the meanings I need into my big rune spreadsheet, and see what it spits out, and tomorrow I'll do lots of math on it and might not come in to the Avalon at all because it's much easier with my computer, and once I have a list all hammered out I try to fit it all nicely into a rectangle and then I quintuple-check everything, and then I come up with a few sentences in French and tell my teacher they're for a story I'm writing, and then I find a really big space to draw on and copy it out there, maybe at night so nobody's like 'what the heck are you doing' if I can get a big light to see what I'm drawing."

She can make a big light.

"That works then."

Cool.

And if it is dangerous it's the kind of dangerous where she ends up in the wrong world or something, not the kind of dangerous where it blows up the Avalon, right? She's fine with the first thing.

"I am sure for secret reasons that I will not blow up the Avalon, and less sure but still pretty confident that I won't even send you to yet a third world."

All right. She'd take her chances on a third one anyway, at this point, if that was the only choice. Not that May hasn't been pretty great.

"Thank you."

May orders a slice of pie for dessert. Banana cream.

Third thing on the dessert list is chocolate cake; fourth is cheesecake. Cheesecake it is.

They are brought their desserts pretty quick.

Yum.

She thinks she's going to spend tomorrow figuring out what kinds of organic things she can sell - that's maybe a little easier of a way to get money if the council decides to be a pain. Is there anything really obvious that she should look up?

"Organic things? - oh! Freeform shapeshifting! Let's see - pearls maybe? Ivory might be illegal. I'm not sure how to go about wholesaling pearls - or anything else -"

Pearls are super easy, yeah. They're not worth much, if she remembers correctly, but that might be enough to get by on, if she can figure it out. Or ivory, yeah, or other kinds of horns, or wool, she can do wool that's just as fancy as her hair is. That might be a little suspicious, though.

"- why aren't pearls worth much?"

.....because they're really easy to make? ...for her, and she's the only magical girl in the whole world, here.

Okay, pearls it is! 

Giggle. "I still don't know how to move them - a pawnshop won't give you what they're worth, but it'd pay cash and I don't mind running them out for you for a small cut."

She'll look online, she can probably find someplace to buy them. But she'll need help getting them there, and May can have a cut for that, yeah.

"Thanks!"

She should have a pretty good amount by the day after tomorrow, if nothing interrupts her. Maybe not a plan for where to send them yet, though.

"Some kinds are probably rarer and more expensive than others," May mentions.

Ooh, yeah, and it's all the same to her - it won't be too suspicious if she has a bunch of rare ones?

"If necessary I can visit multiple pawn shops."

That should work just fine, then. Thanks.

"You're welcome!"

She's somewhat more enthusiastic about her cheesecake now.

When they have both finished, May pays for the pair of them.

Dusk thanks her again. And - hopefully the thing with the Bakers earlier won't be a complete disaster, but if it is and it's not safe for her to hang out in the park, is there someplace else she should try to be so May can find her?

"Good question. Library? Or is that worse?"

Not worse but not better, either.

"There's not really a good hiding place in the Avalon. If they're really serious about finding you they'll ask a bugbear."

She doesn't know what that is.

"Critter. More than most in the natural magic department. They can find people."

Well she wishes she'd known that three or four hours ago. Okay. Park, then, or she has an email account now and she can probably sneak internet access once in a while no matter what happens - it's RheebaTheMoth@gmail.com; she can't write her own messages for the same reason she can't talk but if May puts answers in she can copy them back.

"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.

The fan's a problem, unless it's big enough that she could wiggle past it if she stopped it - they don't know how small she can get but that's a bad lie to get caught in if they check.

It's big but it's not that big, and it doesn't look controllable from here so stopping it would mean jamming it.

All right, that's a no. Any, like - access panels, or anything, for her to poke at while she's up here?

Nope.

Okay.

She flies up through the ceiling anyway.

Now she is above a bunch of warehouses.

She doesn't go far, just enough to get clear of the roof. 

It's cold, and there's snow, and she's not dressed for it.

It's a tall warehouse, though, and she can see the lights of downtown from here, and there's a beauty to that. It helps, even if it hurts at the same time. Clears her head. She's trapped, yes, but it's not here that's trapped her, this time, it's there - they can't keep her, she just can't go, safely. Unless she figures out how, and maybe she can figure out how; she just has to solve the right problem instead of panicking about the wrong one.

She's shivering when she goes back down, a few minutes later, and nervous - that's not the smartest thing she's ever done - but calmer, too.

Nobody seems to have noticed her jaunt.

She heads back to the park and settles in in her tree to read, taking occasional pearl-making breaks, until she's sleepy, and then she sleeps. She's set up a shade, this time, so the light doesn't wake her.

It comes on same as ever but is no match for her shade.

She'll sleep until noon, if it doesn't get loud enough to wake her.

It doesn't; the park visitors keep it down.