Temporary rooms get destroyed, along with their contents. Okay. And no eating around the books, the dead, or in people's rooms. That makes sense.

He nods along, and seems to have run out of questions for the moment. He'll try and find somewhere reasonable to sit in the kitchen while he waits, first for the oven to finish preheating, then for pizza to cook (in two stages, rotating it 180 degrees between them). Once the pizza's looking sufficiently well-done, he'll turn off the oven, look for a cutting board and a knife, and slide the pizza out onto the board, cut it into quarters, find a place he likes to plate it up on, grabs some vitamins (also in his convenient nostalgia box), pours himself a glass of milk, then heads back out to the great hall (or at least he presumes what the room they came in from was) and looks for a place to sit down and eat, somewhere that hopefully won't make him seem standoffish but also won't make people feel like he's intruding.

There are plenty of empty tables. The great hall really isn't very busy, this time of night. No one will talk to him if he doesn't approach them.

Once he's figured out the oven and doesn't seem to have any more questions, the Hearthkeeper sits back down by the fire and waits for him to finish eating.

Then he will go ahead and eat!

It is just as easy to burn the roof of his mouth with this pizza as he remembers, but that's why he's got the milk. Once the pizza's done he'll have the vitamins, then cleans up the crumbs of crust and residual milk, puts the plate and glass away where he found them in the kitchen, and goes all the way back to the entry hallways to grab his jacket and backpack.

Once he's kitted up again, he'll walk back to the Hearthkeeper. "Alright, I'm ready to drop off my books at the library."

"This way." She leads him down a series of hallways. Some of them do have windows, but it's too dark to see outside. For the most part, the refuge seems to be lit by those wall-mounted lamps, covered by glass and burning bright and steady.

"There is something you should understand about my refuge. I did not create it, so much as I carved it out of something else that was already here. That thing is most often called the Eternal House. When I came here, I exerted my power over it to make it safer, more predictable, more hospitable—or, at least I did so for the part of it that forms the refuge. If you leave, you'll find the rest of the house is still quite dangerous, particularly because things tend to move around when you aren't looking. Within the refuge, that tendency has been muted, but even here the house has a will of its own, though benign. The rooms nearest the great hall are mostly stable, but the farther we travel, the less consistent it will become. There are tricks you can learn to navigate—for instance, any path to the library will tend to have artworks of a scholastic theme, the more pronounced the closer you get—but you can also wander the halls with your destination firmly in mind, and you'll find the house will usually take you there without too much delay. In sum, do not expect that you will always or even usually take the same path between any two places, but you almost certainly won't get lost."

She pauses for questions.

Yup, that sounds like some kind of multiversal bullshit. He'll abort his attempt to start building a mental map of this place, given that it'd apparently not do much good, and nod along.

He can feel the angel mostly settle over him, protective and still pretty anxious, only departing when he passes by a window, perhaps to check through it. Nothing to bother stopping about, though. Probably.

"Usually, when you open a door, the house creates a new room behind it. In much the same way that you navigate, you can look for specific types of rooms, or rooms that have specific types of objects within them. This is a good way to find a bathroom or gather supplies. If you wish to keep a room, you can claim it by forming an intention to do so and either spending time there or leaving your things there. This usually works, but isn't always reliable if you have only claimed the room recently and haven't strongly associated yourself with it. If you loose any of your things in a room that you can't find later, let me know and I can retrieve them for you. If you do successfully claim a room, it will persist, although its location will vary as much as any other room in the refuge. None of the doors in my refuge have locks, but if you claim a room, no one will be able to turn the handle and open the door without your permission, as if it were locked. It won't actually stop you from phasing through the door, however. I'm afraid that hasn't come up before. We'll have to find some way to make it obvious to you which doors lead to rooms that belong to someone else, but in the meantime I must ask you not to go through any doors that you can't open by hand. The house is also capable of creating pseudo-outdoor spaces we call gardens, and everything I have said about rooms also applies to them."

Arthur startles, just for an instant, at the Hearthkeeper casually referring to the angel, and seemingly expecting that he can just tell it to stop being a snoop, but schools himself quickly. Obviously the powers or magic or whatever let her bend this place to her will like are going to let her detect the angel. "I'll try and, uh...avoid hallways with doors, I guess. It's not something I can really control other than just not getting into the situation, unfortunately."

"Ah, I didn't realize that. It looked like a part of you. All of the hallways have doors, so you won't really be able to avoid them, and I don't think this calls for you to stay isolated in your room all day. The vast majority of doors in the refuge won't lead anywhere private anyways. How intelligent is it?"

Uh. "I'm not really sure? I don't know how I'd even tell, really. It doesn't, like, talk, or write, but I don't know if that's because it can't or it just doesn't want to. Usually it just kind of does stuff on its own, which is sometimes helpful, like getting stuff out of vending machines for me or pulling me out of the way of danger. Most of the time I don't really know what it's doing, not in specific anyway."

She looks directly at the angel. "If you can understand me, give some indication."

If it's capable of comprehending language at all (even if it doesn't know any specific languages)—it will.

(Arthur will have noticed, by the way, that she's not speaking english, but he understands her.)

He wishes he could control the body so he could flip her the bird. Instead, he contorts his force to push against itself, and forces air through the constriction, making a sound kind of like blowing a raspberry but drier and raspier.

Arthur startles more seriously hearing the sound come from just over his head. What is with the angel lately? This, and the stomping last night, it's a lot more noise than he's used to it making, and so sudden, and so frequent.

"Try not to enter any rooms that belong to someone, and leave if you do. I'll find some way to make it more obvious to you soon."

They continue onwards to the library, and reach it within a few minutes. It's not an especially large library—the shelves could contain as many as ten thousand books—but it seems cozy. The only person present is a pale humanoid, hairless and slender, wearing dark robes and sunglasses. He's reading behind a desk located near the entrance. The Hearthkeeper approaches him.

"Dorian, this is a newcomer with books for copying."

He looks up. "Ah. Welcome to the refuge. You didn't give her your name, did you?" He smirks.

"Anything you have on paper, you can leave with me. We'll copy it and return it to you within fifteen days. Probably sooner than that, it's just the worst case. Anything you have that's digitized or in some other medium is more complicated."

The angel better not get him in trouble, given that he's apparently stuck here.

He wonders whether this Dorian guy is albino. They've got sensitives and need shades all the time, right? "Morning."

Oh, wow. It just entirely slipped his mind to introduce himself. "You can call me Azzy, and I'll get my hard copies out now."

And indeed he does, finding somewhere not terribly in the way to slide off his backpack (which, if the Hearthkeeper's watching, she may notice the angel help with, as it's really quite large for a single young teen to be swinging around) and dig through it, retrieving a handful of hefty textbooks for a couple kinds of advanced mathematics and handing them over to Dorian.

"I mostly just have games and utility stuff on my phone and computer. I usually do most of my reading on the internet-- do you guys have internet? Or, an internet, I guess, if there's more than one."

"Unfortunately, we do not, and it's probably a long time away. Though our library might exceed the internet you're used to in novelty, at least."

He takes a look at the textbooks' tables of contents. "I don't know exactly what we have in mathematics, but it looks like some of this might be new to us. Thank you."

He pulls out some paper and starts taking notes on the content of the books.

Gosh, this guy's taking the notes by hand? That's gotta be rough. Also, darn. He mostly used the internet to, like, keep up with current events, which books are not so good at.

He guesses doesn't really need to keep up with things, given he's never going back though.

He's going to need to figure out what to do with his time...

He shakes the thought off and turns back to the Hearthkeeper. "Do you think it'd be alright if I tried to claim a garden?"

It'd be nice to consistently have someone to charge his battery pack, and he's got all his camping gear anyway.

"You can, though it will probably be small. Most people don't bother because we have common gardens that are much larger."

Dorian looks up. "If you don't need anything else from me, I think you can have this conversation somewhere else."

"Right, sorry."

He guesses he'll be off then. He doesn't think there's much else to talk about? Though he won't complain if the Hearthkeeper has more to explain while he starts looking for a nice garden.

He'll do most of the looking. He can check doors a lot faster after all; waiting for the body to see everything itself would be a waste of time.

"Is there anything in particular that you want, of this garden? I assume you want it to have a 24-hour day cycle and reasonably mild weather."

Honestly, a longer day-night cycle might be nice...

"Reasonably soft ground, I think. Good sun. Not too many flowers, or floral smells, or too many bugs."

Have there been any bugs around, come to think of it? He'd normally find that sort of thing in the walls, but that's seemingly not a thing here.

(There have not been any bugs so far.)

"Alright. I should be able to manage that. Follow me." She turns to the angel. "You aren't going to accomplish very much checking those doors, by the way."

She leads him on a cryptic, winding path through the rooms and halls of the refuge for several minutes before declaring that they're in "the right place to look". She continues walking, according to no logic Arthur can discern, while several of the doors along her path crack open of their own accord. She doesn't stop to look. Eventually, she stops before a door and opens it fully, revealing an outdoor space, approximately fifty by a hundred feet, surrounded on all sides by windowless walls. Shrubs, several trees, and some grass grow within. The foliage seems reflective of a mediterranean climate. The sky above is colored the dark blue of early dawn, with two small moons visible.

"Will this do?"