Sasha's wrists had hurt from typing too much. They don't hurt anymore.

"Oh," he says softly, "that's really good, thank you." 

Leo wiggles with delight.

It is very cute.

It is very cute. 

"I should probably text my boyfriend at some point but you'll meet him tomorrow." 

"I bet your boyfriend's great."

"He is great — he's kind of shy but I bet he'll like you." 

"I don't know how likeable I am, I'm only"-- he glances at a clock-- "eight hours old."

"Well, I haven't even spent all eight of your hours with you and I think you're lovely." 

Tail wagging!

"MORE magic."

He kisses Leo's head again, mostly because it's right there and he can, and then says, "Down." 

A hole opens in Sasha's bedroom floor.

If Sasha looks through it, he sees from above a Japanese garden in spring. A stream babbles to itself. Cherry blossoms drift slowly to the ground. A path winds through the trees.

"....do you know if it'd be easy to get back —" 

"It looks to me like you'd be able to reach the gate from one of the trees."

Yeah, okay, that's good enough. Sasha grabs a sweatshirt so he'll have something to put Leo in while he's climbing, puts Leo in the pouch, and goes through the hole in his floor. 

The air in the garden is cool and smells wonderful, like it just rained. The sky is blue as the ocean with only a few wisps of cloud. There are statues along the path, beautifully carved in a Japanese style; Sasha doesn't recognize any of the people. Not far away, there's an old wooden bridge so he can cross the stream.

There doesn't seem to be anybody else here.

It's gorgeous. Sasha walks around in it for — he isn't sure how long. 

The garden never seems to repeat itself, but he does occasionally find himself looping back to the gate, and to other landmarks: a pavilion through which swoop red-crowned cranes; a bridge around which drifts streams of mist; a stone temple; a black rock surrounded by benches. The environment around the landmarks has the same general themes-- cherry blossom trees, winding paths, eroded statues-- but it is never exactly the same twice.

There's still no one here.

He takes lots and lots of pictures.

After — Sasha isn't sure how long — he finds the gate and climbs a tree and comes back up through the floor of his bedroom. 

The clock reveals that he was gone for about ten seconds.

"...damn." 

He takes his shoes off and sits back down on the bed. 

"That place is called the Garden of Peace," Leo says. "It's one of the friendlier planes. I think 'down' might just create a gate to a random plane if you don't specify, though, and some of them are much more dangerous."

"Good to know. Do you happen to know what other planes there are, or is it the sort of thing you have to find out by trying to go there?" 

"There are billions of planes," Leo says. "Uh, off the top of my head, there's Heaven and Hell and Faerie of course, although you can argue about whether those are planes themselves or just categories of planes. There's the platonic realm where math lives, there's the place where lost property goes, there's the library of unwritten books, there are the Eternal Stairs--"

"Wow. 

....at some point I want to ask about the library of unwritten books but maybe not right now." 

"It's the library of all the books that people thought of but didn't write. A bunch of titles like 'that really cool spy novel I thought of when I was bored on the bus that one time.'"