One of the walls of this dilapidated place is now adorned with an incongruously nice-looking door, made of green-painted wood with a brass doorknob. Something about it feels promising.

Arthur squints at the door.

That was not there yesterday. He checked the entire building for weird shit, since you never know what might've gotten left behind after a fight like the one that cleared this building out.

The angel isn't tugging him away, even after he waits a couple minutes for it to scope things out. Presumably there isn't any immediate danger.

He shrugs. If someone can just make doors appear wherever decided now's the time to try and recruit some random teen, then running probably isn't going to help. At least this spares him the effort of needing to decide.

The angel opens the door, just in case, and Arthur follows its invisible footsteps beyond the threshold.

Inside is a room, with wood floors and plaster walls in good condition. It's empty besides a few bare coatracks and covered lamps mounted on the walls. The soft sounds of indistinct conversation and the flickering of firelight emanate from the bend in the hallway connected to the other side of the room. The door silently closes behind him.

His first instinct is to try and leave something in the way of the door, to keep just ajar enough that he could barrel through if he needs to run, but when he turns around he sees the door's already fully closed.

He shrugs again, then inspects the coat-racks. It's been a chilly spring in the city so far, so he does have a jacket on, and he's got all of his gear in his big camping backpack. It might be polite to drop it off before he goes tromping in. He'll hang up the jacket and drop off his bag in the least conspicuous place he can find.

He feels a bit naked without his stuff, going into an unfamiliar...secret base, he guesses. He does his best to calm down. He can almost hear the angel in the air, going back and forth between him and his stuff over and over, as he walks through the hallway and turns down the bend.

The hallway opens up into a large room with wood-paneled walls, high coffered ceilings, and a large fireplace at the end. Comfortable-looking chairs and couches line the walls, while the center of the room is filled with round tables surrounded by chairs, some of which look like they aren't designed for humans. Most of the tables are unoccupied, except for one where an old man plays cards with two cats and a scaly snake-headed humanoid. At the end of the room, in a chair next to the fireplace, sits a woman in a cream-colored dress with a veil draped over the top of her head.

When Arthur enters the room, the old man waves to him, and the woman sits up to approach.

Huh. An odd-seeming bunch, but what group of presumed supers isn't? He'll do his best to not seem too afraid as he waves back to the old man. He tries to keep himself clean at the gym, but he did sleep in an abandoned and fire-damaged build last night, so he might be a bit dirty compared to everyone else...also possibly a bit younger, since unless the cats or the snake person are kids or teens (which he can't deny is a possibility) then he seems to be the youngest in the room. Hopefully his height and build can cover that up a bit, at least.

He's not exactly sure what to do next, though.

The angel, however, thinks that now is a good time to start snooping. Does anyone here have bags or pockets it can check the inside of? Is there anything hidden under the cushions of the chairs and couches? Where are the exits, other than the way he just came in through? Any windows or doors? Any grates or ducting? If he takes a peek inside the walls, will he find any secret doors or passageways?

The old man and snake-person have pockets. Nothing particularly remarkable in them, although the lack of any electronics might be noteworthy. Nothing under the cushions. There are several doorways along the walls, but no windows. One opens into a large kitchen, the others to hallways, most of which don't seem to take a straight course for very long. The fireplace has a chimney, although the angel can't find its exit. No other ducting or any grates.

He can't actually get through the walls. Beyond the wood paneling and paint is some impervious substance that bars his way. It doesn't seem to have any gaps, besides the overt doorways and chimney.

The woman reaches Arthur.

"Greetings, and welcome. I am called the Hearthkeeper. I suppose you'd appreciate an explanation of this place."

He'll give that wall a solid kick, half to test if it's something he can batter down and half because he's kind of pissed that there's something he can't just ghost through. Then he'll see if he can take a peek through the doors, before going back to anxiously patrolling between the body and his bag.

Assuming that kick makes any sound, he'll flinch at it with genuine surprise. The angel doesn't normally make much sound when other people are around.

"Yes ma'am, I would."

Kicking the wall does not break it down, nor does it make noise. He can peek through the doors. Inside there are more rooms.

"When you entered that green door, you left the world you inhabited behind, almost certainly forever, and entered my refuge. Those who pass through that door, without fail, have something to flee from, and nowhere else to go. This place is a sanctuary for them, and for those who are born here. I do not choose when and where the green door appears, and it is not by my will that you came here or that you are unable to return, but I do control the refuge and endeavor to make it a hospitable place for my guests. Do not harm any of them. If there's anything you need, you can ask me, and I may be able to assist you."

"If you want to get food or claim a room, I can show you how. If you have any books or other written material in your possession, it is customary, though not required, to lend them to the librarians for them to make copies. You may also wish to meet with our resident physician, Ton'guni, for a checkup at some point. If you see a red door, do not pass through it unless you wish to leave my refuge behind and brave the dangers outside. Do you have any questions so far?"

Something to flee from? Yeah, he guesses that fits. He'll have to wait and see what this place is like before he's sure he likes it, but it really wouldn't take much to be better than where he was last night, or bouncing between c-list gangster cribs.

No harm to anyone, either. That...hm. He might need to focus on just...not being around other people too much, then. There's always a risk of the angel lashing out if everything isn't totally copacetic.

He wonders what she'd say to someone colorblind. Cats are colorblind, aren't they? Though, maybe these aren't normal cats. They're playing cards after all, which is not something he's seen normal cats do before.

"I'm awful at thinking of questions, but if I come up with any later I'll be sure to mention them."

The only calories he had today was the sugar from those energy drinks, which wasn't terribly filling. "I think I could do with some food, first. Then I'll go bring my books to the library," presuming he can find it, "then find somewhere to sleep."

"Very well. Follow me."

She leads him through the doorway into the kitchen. A few large pots are simmering on one of the stoves.

"Some of my guests enjoy cooking, and when it's convenient for them to do so, will cook in large batches, so you'll usually be able to find hot food in here. There's stew and rice on the stove. You can also get raw ingredients for cooking or eating from the pantry. It should be capable of providing you with anything you're familiar with, but it isn't always cooperative. If you're having trouble getting something specific you want, let me know and I can help. Dishes are usually in those cabinets, and utensils in those drawers. If you find anything you like, you can keep it."

He nods, initially giving the stew and rice a quite look-and-sniff to check if either seems palatable, which unfortunately neither do.

When she mentions that the pantry should be able to provide ingredients, he asks, "Would it be able to give something like blocks of instant ramen, or frozen pizzas?"

"It should. If you open the door with a firm idea of what you're looking for, you'll usually be able to find it."

He nods again, steps over to the cabinet, and takes a moment to visualize as much as he can remember about his favorite frozen pizza brand, back before he ran away. The imagery on the box, the feeling of the cardboard and the plastic wrapper inside, the cold firmness of the pizza itself that always softened just a touch as he let it thaw while the oven preheated, the smell both right out of the wrapper and as it cooked, the look of the cheese as it went from pale to black-spotted yellow, the taste on his tongue and the heat of the fresh pizza on the roof of his mouth. Then he opens up the cabinet and hopes that it's there.

It's there, several boxes in an icebox, along with his favorite brand of ramen and various other foods he's familiar with.

Score! It's even got some of those weird eastern European candies and chocolates that the grocery store by his parent's house had. He'll definitely grab some of those for dessert. This'll be a nice nostalgia trip.

He grabs a frozen pizza box and starts working through the box and wrapper as he asks the Hearthkeeper another question. "Does the oven have any tricks to it, or is it all normal? Or is it, uh..." what's a polite way of putting it... "fantastical, like the cabinet?"

"It's heated by magical fire, but isn't especially difficult or unpredictable to use. What units are you used to for time and temperature?"

Good to know that magic isn't a bad word. He knows some supers are touchy about that, especially the ones who build gadgets.

"Minutes and degrees Fahrenheit, though I can do conversions on my phone," he retrieves it from his pocket to show before quickly stowing it again. "That does remind me, do you have electricity here?" A moment later, after he's considered the oven's controls and started it preheating, he asks further, "and what kind? I think remember it's on a different frequency, and with different plugs, outside the US."

"You're from an Earth then? We've had more than a few people from Earths, and know the units. You'll want to consult that table to determine how many minutes the hourglasses last for." There are a series of different size hourglasses on the counter near the oven, labeled in units of time he's never seen before, and apparently no other way to time things. The oven itself has one knob for temperature with a metal plate on which is engraved a table describing the various temperature levels in a dozen different units, including Fahrenheit.

"We do have electricity, but no wiring in the walls yet. You'll have to find the electrical engineering workshop tomorrow and ask them for help—they have generators and equipment to supply electricity with the parameters your device is expecting. Fortunately, we are also familiar with Earth electrical units."

Earths, huh? He remembers reading something about multiverse theory a while back, and that supers have something to do with it somehow. This place must be on that level. Especially if she's talking about Earths like they're just one kind of world. He guesses that makes sense though. It'd be a little weird if every world were like Earth.

He nods. "It's not a big worry, I've got some solar panels too if the generators are already mostly spoken for. Just need to find a room with some good sun."

He'll take his phone back out, and assuming it doesn't not-work because magic, he'll just a set a timer on it rather than figuring things out with the hourglasses.

"Any rules about where I should eat, or how much clean-up I should do after?"

"The generators are in use for various purposes, but they do have spare capacity. Though you should also be able to find a room with good light without too much trouble. Don't eat in the library, masoleum, or someone's private spaces if they don't want you to. Some things the house will clean on its own, but don't leave any larger objects lying around one of the permanent spaces. Garbage is most often disposed of by leaving it in a temporary room, because those will later be destroyed. I can show you how that works when you're done eating. We also have a common wastebasket in the great hall to spare everyone from making the same trip when they eat here."

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?"

If he could grumble irritably, he would. Instead he blows another dry raspberry and keeps checking doors as they go along, fruitlessly, just out of spite.

Arthur figures she's just using some magical bullshit to figure stuff out. He is going to try and find some patterns, once he's settled, but he's not getting his hopes up yet.

"Yeah, this seems good. Thank you, Ms. Hearthkeeper," he replies, only realizing as he says it that the 'Ms.' prefix does not quite feel right, cringing just a little as the faux pas passes his lips. "The double moons are pretty neat. And, uh, is there just an invisible ceiling or does that opening go somewhere?"

Naturally, he's already sliding up the walls to check himself by the time the body's asked.

"There isn't a ceiling, exactly, but if you keep going upwards, eventually you'll find you aren't getting any farther above the ground."

"If you don't have any questions, I'll leave you to get settled. If you need something, you'll be able to find me in the great hall."

He'll see about that!

"I think I'm good for now."

And while the angel's doing...whatever he's doing right now, Arthur will get started unpacking and setting up. He's feeling pretty good, probably because he's had the first reasonably balanced meal in a few days this morning, and maybe some lingering buzz from the energy drinks, so it doesn't take too long. His first instinct afterwards is to sit down and check his phone...which obviously doesn't turn up anything useful. He doesn't have his books either, naturally.

His mind wanders for a while, wondering what caused a place like this to exist. Eventually he collects one of his fresher notebooks and a pencil and starts writing and occasionally doodling, switching between journaling about the last couple weeks, writing down things he wants to investigate about this place, and putting bits and pieces of story or setting ideas he's had onto paper. Occasionally he'll shift how he's sitting, or get up and stretch or go for a jog around the space. It's kind of crazy to him that people apparently think this is small. He's pretty sure this one garden is bigger than the park by his parents' house.

He wants to explore the refuge more, but the Hearthkeeper said that part of claiming a room is spending time inside, so he think he's going to try and sit tight for a while. He'll probably check on his books tomorrow, and maybe get another meal in the kitchen.

Well, he's gotten over the wall. He's not entirely sure what he was expecting, but it wasn't this.

It's kind of disorienting as he floats along the grid of rooftops he's come upon. He's going in a straight line, or at least it feels like he is, but instead of steadily getting further away from the body, he can feel himself getting further, then closer, then further, then closer, over and over. The roofs repeat. So does the garden.

He's read about this. It's like he's in a space with elliptic geometry, rather than euclidean. At least in the horizontal directions.

Eventually, after exploring the roofs for a while longer, he floats back down into the garden and sees what happens if he tries to go down.

Several dozen feet of soil, then a flat plane of that same impervious substance that's inside the walls. If he tries going underground and then underneath the building, it's the same.

He gives it another kick for good measure, then floats back to the surface.

The body is still just hanging around, but while it's stuck here waiting, he can at least go explore elsewhere in the refuge.

Let's see where else he can find.

Is he looking for anything in particular?

Sort of? He's not entirely focused on any specific thing. He's thinking about the rooms and people he's already seen, he's thinking about the magic in the kitchen, about that electrical engineering workshop the matron mentioned, he's thinking about the strange geometry of the garden the body's busy trying cement his claim on.

Mostly, he just wants to see what this place can do. He wants rooms that'll tell him what's possible here, information that he can start fitting together into an idea of how this place works.

Well, mostly there are a lot of rooms, and hallways, and staircases, and doors. The layout is... almost as if someone built a bunch of separate houses, then haphazardly stiched them together. Hallways bend all over the place, mostly at square angles, and refuse to stay straight for long. Rooms are grouped together with no logic or thought for functionality. Sometimes there are multiple kitchens in adjacent rooms, for instance. Staircases are less likely to go straight up and down than they are to wind around unevenly and have landings in strange places and connect with other staircases. Some of the hallways are fairly broad, some of them would be uncomfortably narrow for an adult man. Sometimes there are windows, more often in the rooms than the hallways, but their placement does not imply a consistent spatial relationship between the inside and the outside. For nearly all of the windows, it's dark outside. (If he goes through a window, or finds a door leading outside, he'll find a garden area.) Overall, the layout of the house implies a complete lack of the planning that an actual architect would do when constructing a building, or perhaps an active opposition to planning or things that look like they were designed with a purpose. It also becomes apparent that the geometry of the house is not euclidean, because it is possible to loop around to the same place you were earlier, without taking a path that would form a closed loop in euclidean space. Either that, or the house is just moving things around when he isn't looking.

Most of the rooms can be described as bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, sitting rooms, or dining rooms. The style of the furniture, furnishings, decor, etc. varies a lot, though the lanterns are consistent. Sometimes there are fireplaces. It's pretty clear that, when the house creates these rooms for him, what it wants to be is a house. Everything he finds could conceivably be found in a domestic setting of some kind, or maybe a hotel or inn, and he's more likely to find things that are more likely to be found in a house. Everything appears to be sized for and designed for human bodies. The tech level of the things he finds ranges from fairly primitive (though not to the point of straw huts—all the rooms have solid walls) to something like victorian era. Unlike the layout of the house, the content of the individual rooms themselves is fairly logical—no half-bedroom, half-kitchen monstrosities. The furniture is placed in a way that makes sense, the decor looks like it all came from the same planet and even the same culture most of the time, and overall the rooms clearly have specific functions and would suit those functions reasonably well.

The angel wanders through hundreds of empty rooms before he finds a bedroom with a woman sleeping inside. She seems human.

He wonders why it's so often dark. It was morning, even if it wasn't exactly bright, back in the garden the body's hunkered down in.

Given the whole 'temporary rooms get destroyed' bit, and the weirdness with over the garden wall, he really wouldn't be surprised if rooms are moving and it's all non-euclidean, except for where the walls and floor keep space nice and straight.

The nigh-on anti-planning of the structure also gives him the vibe of, like, procgen in a game. Like there's just a machine whirring away somewhere around thinking up random plausible rooms and just sort of plopping them down whenever someone opens a door, modulo whatever magic the matron's done to make it play nice. It's not hard to imagine how this could get dangerous without that. He wonders whether all the rooms being reasonably complete is fundamental to the substructure or something the matron's magic is enforcing. Hell, maybe even the space looking euclidean if you stick to the normal parts of individual rooms is something she added too, and the rest of this place is full distorted.

The fact that she said the substructure as a whole was called the Eternal House does make him think the fact that the rooms are all orbiting around this handful of archetypes is inherent to it, though.

He wishes he could see the guts of this thing, or at least of what the matron's built on top of it. Hopefully the body can worm its way into her good graces and get her to teach him some magic or something.

Oh! Another person. He doesn't think he's been gone long enough for it to have gone from morning to night, but it's hard to tell with the windows, and who knows what kind of time zone this person was coming from, or even whether her sleep schedule is sync'd up with anything in particular.

Should he leave? Maybe.

Will he leave? ...If looks like he's about to get caught.

He'll give the room a once over for anything interesting or valuable seeming, before hanging out over the door and see if anything happens before he gets bored.

The woman does have a diary, some books, and some jewelry.

Ooh, a diary. It's been a while since he's read a closed book, but he's pretty sure he's still got the trick. Let's see just who this lady is...

"I think that's enough."

The Hearthkeeper is right behind him, apparently. She's speaking quietly.

Damn. At least he knows she's spying on him now, though.

He'll back away from the diary slowly.

"Leave."

She firmly points her finger to the door.

He'll try and trudge away through the door as miserably as he can, given his lack of a body.

Now probably isn't a bad time to check back in on the body, anyway. He wonders how snapping back will work, given the whole spatial weirdness going on. Might as well give it a try!

He can't really tell where Arthur is, but is able to snap back to him without trouble.

A few moments later, there's a knock on the door.

Arthur's briefly overcome by an odd and very sudden feeling of nausea, bad enough that he thinks he might hurl for a second, but it clears up almost as a quickly as it came on. Weird. Maybe he's adjusting weirdly to this garden or something.

"Just a second!" he says, steadying himself and making sure there isn't going to be a second wave of nausea before heading over to open the door.

"Hello. I'm here to speak to the angel." She looks at it. "Don't intrude upon the privacy of my guests. If you enter a room that belongs to someone, leave immediately. Do you understand?"

Freaking seriously? He pivots to look at wherever the Hearthkeeper is looking with genuine betrayal on his face.

How, exactly, is he supposed to reply to that? He doesn't have a throat! Or hands!

Looks around for a moment, then flits over to where the body left his notebook and pencil, tries his damnedest to write 'I understand' with as much ire as he wish he could speak with in the corner of one page, tears it off, and drags the paper back over through the air and does his best to 'toss' it at the matron.

"Hey! Wait!" he calls out and starts to run back over when he sees the angel writing in, and then tearing, a page of his notebook.

He cradles the object protectively for a moment once he reaches it, before putting it back down and heading back to the Hearthkeeper. "Sorry. I guess it got into somebody's room? I didn't even know that it was gone..."

"Good." She turns to address Arthur. "It got into someone's room and tried to read their diary. I don't hold you responsible for this, but because it's able to return to your location at will, most of the remedies I could employ if it keeps causing trouble would affect you as well. I think the best solution would be to disconnect this garden from the rest of my refuge and slow down time here, relative to the rest of my refuge. This would allow me to do the work to prevent the angel from causing more trouble in what you would perceive as a short amount of time: probably a few hours, two days on the high end. Other than getting your books back from the library much earlier than you expected and being stuck here for a little bit—I can bring you food and anything else you need, to be clear—this wouldn't affect you very much if I did it now, because you don't have a social life here yet. If I did it several days or weeks from now in response to the angel causing more trouble, your friends would go quite a while without seeing you. There are other potential solutions, to be clear, and if the angel did cause trouble in the future such that I was forced to do something about it, I would discuss that with you and try to find something that causes you the least inconvenience possible. But, if you think it's at all likely to cause trouble in the future, placing the two of you into dialated time now is probably the least inconvenient option for you. Does all that make sense?"

The angel...has gotten him put it literal timeout.

He feels a flash of hot anger at it, at this himself, for just a second, before it quickly drains away into a deep, cold embarrassment, and disappointment, and sadness, and self-loathing.

"Yeah, that all makes sense," he replies, doing his best to not let his voice waver or crack. "Thank you, and sorry for the trouble. I've got food and water in my pack, so I should be good, I think."

Then he'll walk back over to the little camp he's set up and sitting back down, very still and quiet, picking his notebook back up and just setting it down in his lap without opening it.

"You want to go with the time dialation option then?"

Oh, there was a question. "Yeah. I'd rather lose the time now rather than later."

"Very well. I'll make sure the door leads to a bathroom. Is there anything else you need?"

He's not sure he can muster a confident voice anymore, so he just tries to smile and shake his head.

She departs. Half an hour later, she returns with Arthur's books, back from the library.

"By the way, if you want the day/night cycle of your garden to be synchronized with the day/night cycle that most of the refuge uses, or off by a specific amount, this would be a convenient time to do that—it won't take more than an extra second or two from your perspective."

He's still sitting in the same spot as before, pretty clearly having cried with his face still a bit puffy and his glasses in a slightly different position, but he seems calmer now. His breathing's more regular, and rather than just sitting still he's back to looking through his notebook.

"Yeah, that sounds good," he replies, his voice still a little brittle.

"Do you want it synchronized, then?"

He flinches, just he tiniest amount, then nods. "If that's alright."

"That's what I'll do, then."

She departs. If Arthur doesn't indicate he needs anything, several more hours will pass uninterrupted.

Indeed he does not. He uses the bathroom a couple times, and eats some of the snacks he had in his pack, takes some sips from his thermos, mills around, and writes more in his notebook.

Eventually, he's back in action as well, after sort of not existing for a while there. He's still pretty miffed, but he's more scared than he is angry now.

Neither of those stop him from getting bored as the hours go by though, so he'll do some more exploring. There's only one direction he hasn't checked in here, and that's skyward.

He's not so good at straight-up flying, but if he grabs some leaves off the trees and blows them upwards, he can sort of follow them up. The image of the body, shrunk down to the size of an ant, riding the leaf up into the sky comes to his mind for some reason.

He can get a few hundred feet above the surface before he stops getting any higher. It feels like he's still moving, he just doesn't actually gain altitude beyond that point. The endlessly repeating grid of gardens and rooftops stretches out below him.

Yeah, figured. Honestly, it's kind of similar to how he feels when he tries to go this high up without something like this leaf or a piece of paper or whatever.

He'll abandon his impromptu vehicle and flit back to the rooftops around the garden and start poking around to see if he can find anything like a seam or incongruity, or a gap that he might be able to slip through to...somewhere, he doesn't really know where it'd go.

Nope. No windows, just roofs and walls with that impervious layer under the surface.

Boooring.

Hm...

He'll flit back down to the ground and wait for a while longer, until the body goes to use the toilet again, then he'll follow it into the bathroom and, after taking a minute to build some courage, tries exploring down the sink drain.

He doesn't get very far before he hits another impervious barrier. It looks like all the water that reaches this point is instantaneously annihilated.

The universal plumbing solution: Just Fucking Delete The Wastewater.

Hm...alright. What if he goes up the faucet, to where the water would come from? Is it just getting created ex nihilo from another impermeable barrier?

Yep!

Yeah, that tracks.

Alright. Does the bathroom have any air ducts? And if it does, do they have a similar situation as the water pipes?

There are no air ducts.

Damn. Just his luck. Looks like he's out of leads, at least in terms of finding new places to explore. What else could he do...

He heads back down underground and starts mapping out where all the trees and bushes' roots are, to see if any of them look strong enough to hold up the ceiling of a little hidey-hole.

That depends on how little he wants his hole to be, but he can probably build something under one of the trees.

Ideally big enough to squirrel away his whole backpack, but he'll settle for something big enough for his laptop and notebooks.

For now, he'll work on moving the soil to collect any air bubbles that are already present together, just to get the hole started. Then he'll head back the surface and look for decently inconspicuous place for him to cut through the grass and start bringing down air and bring up loose earth.

He can occupy himself doing this for some time.

And he will! And once the hidey-hole's big enough, he'll collecting branches from bushes to reinforce the walls with.

And Arthur will start rereading one of his math textbooks, at least it starts getting dark.

It's a little over six hours in total before the Hearthkeeper returns. It is now midday in the garden (and in the rest of the refuge).

"I figured out how to move the angel around, and prevent it from entering designated spaces. For now, that's just private spaces where you wouldn't be able to open the door, and within about a few inches of people other than you. I won't have any difficulty handling any trouble it causes in the future. Thank you for your patience, Azzy."

Arthur has not been literally holding his breath for the last six hours, but the sigh of relief he lets out might make you think otherwise. "Thank you, Hearthkeeper. I'm sorry again for the trouble," he says as he closes the textbook and stands. "Do you know whether this has been enough time for the garden to be claimed?"

"If you leave your tent here, it will almost certainly count. If you don't, it will likely also count, but less certainly."

He nods. "I just really don't want to lose my stuff, but...I'd like to have pizza again for lunch, if I can. And maybe try and make friends."

"You wouldn't loose your stuff—I'd be able to retrieve it for you. You'd just loose this specific garden. I could find you a replacement that satisfies the same criteria, it just wouldn't be exactly the same."

He looks relieved, again, to hear that, and nods with a smile. "Thank you. Is there anything else I should do before I head out?" he asks, then adds, "uh, if it's getting close to lunch time. I don't know when people here usually eat."

"I don't think there's anything in particular you need to do before leaving. Mealtimes are highly variable based on personal preference, cultural practices, the differences in appetite and digestion between various species, etcetera. This time of day is a fairly common time for people to eat. Dinnertime, six to eight hours from now, is the most common time for people to eat, and the schelling point for social activity in the great hall."

He nods again. "I think I'll still get something to eat now, but I'll make sure to check back around dinnertime as well."

And, if it doesn't seem like she has more to say or want to take him anywhere, he'll head out and start trying to find the kitchen.

The hallway outside the door to his garden is different, but if he wanders around for a while eventually he'll run into another hallway with a few people walking through it, and if he follows them it's only a few minutes to the great hall (to which the kitchen is attached). There are maybe fifty to a hundred people present, either eating food at the tables or preparing it in the kitchen (which is actually quite large and has enough space for this). Most of them look human, human-ish, or humanoid, but there are also a few cats and people with various non-humanoid body plans.

The snake-person Arthur saw in here when he first arrived is eating at a table with a few other people he doesn't recognize.

Wow! It's ages since he was in a room with this many people. Maybe not since before he ran away and was still going to school. It's honestly a bit nerve-wracking, but also kind of nice? There's enough seemingly normal people here that he might be able to disappear into the crowd a bit.

He'll head to the kitchen, see if he can conjure up another frozen pizza from the cabinet and find a free oven to start preheating.

He can do that, or he can stick his pizza on the spare rack of an oven someone is already using at the temperature he needs.

Eeeh, he doesn't know if a magic oven works the same, but he knows he's run into trouble trying to bake his pizzas when there's other stuff in the oven at the same time. Maybe he can ask one of the other...refugees (?) about it. And about what a good word for 'the people living in the Hearthkeeper's Refuge' might be, but for now he'll stick with using an empty oven (and try and ward people away from using it while his pizza cooks).

Regardless, after retrieving his well-done pizza and acquiring a glass of milk, he'll return to the great hall and assess the tables to see if there are any groups that seem especially amenable to a newbie joining them.

Well, if he stands around with a plate of food looking for a place to sit, it will be obvious enough that he's looking for a place to sit, and someone will give him a friendly wave. There are a few free spots at their table.

Sure! An invitation is an invitation.

Who's he sitting with? And what were they up to, if anything other than just eating lunch?

A young human man and a young woman who looks human except for the blue fur covering her body. They seem to just be chatting and eating.

"Hey. I'm James."

He's speaking recognizable American English, surprisingly enough.

"And I'm Tasha. You're the old new guy, right? We heard you were in time dilation to solve some problem."

Arthur gives an embarrassed smile. "Hey, yeah. I'm Azzy. I have an, uh...I just call it my guardian angel, even though it's been more trouble than help in here, and it kept going into people's rooms. The Hearthkeeper got that all fixed now, though!"

He attempts to take a bite of his pizza and recoils as it's still too hot, which seems to remind him of a question on his mind. "How long has it been, on the outside? If you know."

"Two hundred fifty-ish days, I think? I don't know exactly when you arrived, I just heard of your existence through the rumor mill. It's always a minor event when someone new shows up, you know? And then when no one saw you and we found out you were, you know, it was kinda mysterious and interesting."

"And, if you want to keep it mysterious and interesting, don't tell anyone why you were in time dialation. We'd keep your secret." Tasha adds, with a wink.

The angel got him run through the rumor mill! God damn it.

"Uh. Any idea what sort of rumors were being milled? Depending on what they are, the truth might be preferable..."

"I mean, the only thing anyone knew for certain was that Levron, Jori, Ora, and Sixtoes saw you come in late one night, eat some pizza, and walk off with the Hearthkeeper. Then the library had some new math books and no one saw you again, which was fairly unusual, so when we asked the Hearthkeeper about it, she just said you were in time dilation while she solved a problem related to you. Obviously there was a ton of speculation about what that problem was, but nothing concrete. And like, I think everyone knew that all the ideas floating around were just speculation for fun. I'm pretty sure no one took any of the theories seriously, but I can list some of them if you want."

Okay, the cats were definitely also people, and the older guy and snake person weren't just humoring them with cards. That or the older guy and the snake person are actually two people each, or one of them is three.

Also, if he's honest, he has no idea whether Tasha is being accurate when she says everybody knows it's just speculation, even if it seems like she believes it. "I'd appreciate it, though given that context I understand if you didn't bother committing any of it to memory."

"Uh, some people said you had a horrific terminal illness and Ton'guni needed extra time to brew a cure—a theory that rapidly lost any plausibility after day twenty or so, it never takes him that long—some people said you had some kind of magical curse that demanded human sacrifice and the Hearthkeeper had to figure out how to make the pantry supply human hearts that were still alive—I think you can see what I mean about people inventing theories for fun—some people said that you were a powerful wizard with a great sensitivity to magic, and since the refuge has so much of it you were getting a headache, and the Hearthkeeper had to stick you in the secret magic-free part of the refuge—that would clearly be taken as a joke, by the way—while she enchanted a mighty bucket hat to shield you from it... some people said that on your home world, cats were lethal predators, so you were terrified of them—I guess the idea was that you bravely overcame your fear of Ora and Sixtoes to eat pizza, or something—and since there are so many cats here, the Hearthkeeper had to figure out how to cast an illusion that would make cats appear to you as adorable giant centipedes, so you could lead a normal life. That kind of thing."

He doesn't mind cats, but now he's thinking about adorable giant centipedes and kind of wishes he could have one as a pet. He has no idea how the angel would react, though, or what he'd feed it. He thinks centipedes are the ones that are carnivorous?

"Fair enough. I guess...I don't know." Normally he'd be happy to take being mysterious, being mysterious was how he got away with skimming the extra off of a bunch of different small-time gangs back in the city, but he doesn't know whether that sort of tactic is really necessary here, or if it'd really even help him at all. "Do either of you think being mysterious be helpful?"

He tests his pizza again and it's still pretty hot but cool enough that he can takes bites as long as he alternates with sips of cool milk.

"Well, it depends on how you want people to perceive you. If you treat it as a bit, you know, if you're good-humored about it, it could make for a good-conversation starter and joke and endear you to people. If you treat it like you think no one deserves to the answer, people would be annoyed and think less of you. If you treat it like it's just something you don't want to talk about, people will accept that and overlook it. If you tell people the truth, I think they'll be curious to know more about your guardian angel—I'm definitely curious, especially given you sound American—but it probably won't strongly influence anyone's opinion one way or another."

"Yeah, I was kinda joking about being mysterious and interesting, to be clear. I don't think it will really matter very much one way or another. Just do whatever you feel like doing."

Oh, huh. He doesn't normally think of himself as having an accent, but he guesses everybody kind of thinks of themself that way, other than people who actively train their accent. He wonders whether James can tell he's from Chicago specifically.

"Fair enough. Honestly it sounds like telling the truth would have almost the same effect as, uh...making a game of it, I guess, maybe. In terms of being a conversation starter, anyway. But yeah, what do you want to know about it? I don't know everything myself, but I'm happy to share what I do know."

"Uh, what is it, how does it work, what kind of things does it do, how common are supernatural things in its general reference class where you come from..."

"Point by point: I don't really know in detail other than it's sort of attached to me, or at least is pretty committed to not leaving for good, and that the Hearthkeeper said it 'looked like part of me'; I have no idea, and don't really know where to start with figuring it out; it moves stuff, or sometimes pushes or pulls me if I'm about to running into something or something's about to hit me, and sometimes does stuff like knock stuff out of vending machines or picks things up off the ground for me, and apparently snoops around quite a bit; and I'm not entirely sure since like I said I don't actually know exactly what it is, but I know at least a handful of supers who can conjure invisible spirits or whatever, and if it is part of me and I'm just, like, doing telekinesis or astrally projecting without realizing it, that's also definitely a thing that people do sometimes. There's probably other possibilities that aren't coming immediately to mind."

James clicks his fingers and makes a finger gun.

"Supers. What are those?"

"Uh, superhumans? Like there were in comic books before they started being real. People with superpowers."

"Yep, definitely don't have those where I come from. Whatever weird shit we have is well-hidden."

"I wish we had more comic books in the library. It's just a few. And if we wanted to write any new ones, there would probably only be one copy, because setting up to print them takes forever. I guess there's copying by hand, but unless it's one artist drawing all the copies, they wouldn't really be copies."

Arthur is tempted to ask 'You don't have comic books?' initially out of genuine confusion and then as a sarcastic cover for that confusion, but manages to think better of it before his mouth runs ahead of him.

"Yeah. People are still trying to figure out if they really just started happening at the turn of the millennium or if that's just when they started, like, becoming common? Or coming to light? There aren't any solid records of them existing before then as far as I'm aware. On my world anyway, I figure that's probably going to vary."

And that's too bad to hear. He wishes he could do something to help with that, but unless he can increase his creativity and artistic skills by two or three orders of magnitude, and figure out how to coax the angel into copying comic books at an industrial scale...

Yeah, no way.

...or spend a bunch of time figuring out how to build a printer and synthesize ink from scratch, he's not sure what he could do.

Maybe he can change the topic. "It sounds like James's world is kind of similar to mine, historically at least. What about yours Tasha? If you're comfortable sharing."

"Yeah, I'm from an Earth. Austin, Texas, 2018."

"My homeworld is called Vyshoom, in my language. I don't know as much about it as you probably know about Earth, because the tech level was lower, at least where I lived, and I wasn't exactly well-educated. But talking to James, I think we've figured out the most salient differences... it's a lot wetter and stormier. The town I grew up in would have a pretty tropical climate by Earth standards, plus more and worse storms, but the latitude was more like thirty to fourty-five degrees. Much more volcanic activity. No moon. Obviously the flora and fauna were completely different, but the basic vertebrate skeletal structure is pretty much the same, oddly enough. I have four fewer ribs than you guys, though." She smiles for a moment. "The social climate was... not great, but probably not worse than a lot of places on Earth, historically. No magic, at least not that I knew of. I mean, we didn't exactly have much of a scientific community studying things to confirm they were as explicable as I think they probably were, and there were always rumors and superstitions and religious beliefs about things that would be supernatural by the standards of most refugees, but nothing I think was probably supernatural, based on what I remember."

Huh. "2018 when you came in to the refuge? Or 2018 now?" he asks, then thinks some more before adding, "I guess with the time dilation and the fact that no one can go back, there's no way to tell for sure. It was 2024 when I got the green door."

Oh, wow, lots of interesting near-parallels with that. "I guess, given the tech level, that you don't know much about what your evolutionary predecessors were like?" he asks Tasha.

"2018 when I came in. I've lived here for... about three years, I think."

"No. There are animals that live near where I grew up that I think aren't that different from Earth primates, so there's probably a common ancestor there, but the first time I heard of evolution was after I got here."

He nods along, and continues working his way through his pizza. He's run out of questions, at the moment at least, and was never all that good at small-talk.

"What do you think you're going to do, now that you're in the refuge?"

He shrugs. "I haven't really figured it out. I guess it mostly depends on what there is to do? Given it's all around us here I'm kind of hoping I can learn more about magic, but I don't really know if it's a thing that people can just, like, sit down and read a book about."

"There are plenty of books you can read about magic. Actually learning how to do magic is much more difficult. I don't think anyone in the refuge right now has teachable magic besides Ton'guni, and he won't teach humans. Apparently it takes fifty years or so to reach a basic level of skill, and we don't live long enough for it to be worth it. There are a few books that could maybe teach magic, but I don't think anyone has gotten anywhere with them."

"There is the telekinesis."

"Oh, yeah. The cats wanted to be able to like, do things, and obviously they don't have hands, so the Hearthkeeper gave everyone some minor telekinesis. It can't exert very much force, so those of us who do have hands don't make much use of it, but it's good for a few things, and there are some fun tricks you can learn if you practice."

He picks up the (now crumb-strewn) plate that the body was eating off of, as much for the comedic timing as to actually be helpful, carrying it over to the trash receptacle, then back to the kitchen to clean.

Well, that is some comedic timing. "I'm not sure how much use that'll be for me. I guess maybe having a little bit of T.K. that I can actually control might be nice, though."

"You were wondering what there is to do? We have a decent library, definitely not as big as the people who came from worlds with internets would like, but I think the diversity of texts from different worlds is really interesting. The permanent gardens are pretty big, so we can do most outdoor activities. I think a lot of things people do also kinda revolve around what things are easy or hard for us to get from the house. Like, it's easy to find clothing, but not specific things you want or clothing that fits you really well, so some people are into tailoring. Food is popular with everyone and ingredients are free, so cooking is another common hobby. And the house won't give us anything above a certain tech level, or anything that you wouldn't find in like, an actual house somewhere, so there's a group of people working on manufacturing stuff and gradually increasing our technological capabilities. They've got a forge and a machine shop and some generators, stuff like that. And most types of social activities or hobbies or games you can think of probably have some people into them."

"I think a lot of people just like to take it easy, do whatever is fun for them, make friends—you do meet a lot of interesting people here, that's for sure—there are some people who are really devoted to some goal or ambition, but it's definitely not a majority. That's... probably related to how most people end up here. The green door always takes people who have something they need to get away from. And when they do, often what they want to do is like, relax and let themselves heal."

"Yeah."

"I think it's different for everyone, both what they had to deal with and how they handle it once they get here, but the result is that it's a fairly laid-back place."

"The cats were all born here, so none of that applies to them. I think they're just naturally laid back."

"I don't think I've ever met a cat that wasn't laid back, so that tracks," he says, not really respond to the actual content of that exchange for a moment as he thinks. "I guess I'll probably mostly be doing the same, I guess? Maybe try and make some friends."

"They're like, either laid back, or really intently focused on something. And yeah, it's good to make friends. If you want to meet people, finding a group for some hobby you're interested in is a good idea. Dinnertime in here is also kinda a big deal... and a few of the cats are uncannily good matchmakers."

Atrhur flushes a bit without entirely realizing it at the mention of matchmaking cats. "Yeah. I don't know if I'll really be hungry again in just a few hours, I haven't been super active today and eaten plenty already, but I'm still planning to come by around dinnertime, just to try and get situated."

"Alright, we..." she shares a look with James, "probably won't see you then, but you'll probably run into people that aren't here now."

"Yeah, I think Levron has been wanting to meet you."

They've finished eating by now, and stand up to leave.

"Anyways, we're off. It was nice meeting you, Azzy. Welcome to the refuge."

He nods, gives them both a smile and a wave, then polishes off his milk and brings the glass back to the kitchen for cleaning.

He could try and talk with more people, it seemed like there were still plenty eating, but he'd feel pretty awkward just sitting down and talking without anything to eat and he's properly full now.

James did say there were books about magic, even if they aren't going to let him do magic himself. That still sounds interesting, and maybe getting theoretical grounding will still let him understand how this place works better. If he's lucky maybe it'll even help get a better handle the angel.

So he'll go ahead and try to find the library again.

There are more people in the library, this time of day. Maybe two dozen. Sitting behind the front desk (where Dorian was last night) is a hairless red-skinned man with four arms. He's about seven feet tall, quite muscular, and wearing a white sleeveless shirt. He's in the middle of a book, obviously.

Huh. Dorian didn't have any hair either. He wonders whether that's an accident, or there's a clique of hairless people who have the run of the library, or there's some sort of rule about it.

He'll walk up to the desk and, if the guy doesn't greet him, see if there's a reasonably polite way to get his attention, like a bell or something.

He can hear Arthur coming. He looks up.

"Oh, you must be the new guy. What's up?"

"Yeah, you can call me Azzy. I was wondering if you could point me to any books about magic? Especially if there's anything the Hearthkeeper herself has written, or maybe independent research on how the Eternal House works?"

"My name is Ulthi. Magic is different in pretty much every world that has it. We have some books about the way magic works on specific worlds, and some books doing comparative magic—it's like comparative religion, trying to compare how magic works between different worlds, find common factors and trends, etcetera. The Hearthkeeper hasn't written any books, unfortunately, and she's pretty tight-lipped about how her own magic works. She probably knows more about how the house works than she explains to us, too."

"If you want to know how the house works, there are two problems with that. First, if you want to know how the house works on its own, without the influence of the Hearthkeeper's magic, the only things we know are from people who mounted expeditions and returned. There aren't many of those, and they didn't give us a ton of information. Second, if you want to know how the refuge works, we do have some works, but they tend to be pretty specific. Researching a single topic that can be approached empirically, basically, like the frequency of various types of rooms you'll encounter under certain conditions. I don't think we have a good book about how the refuge works in general, because that's assumed to be common knowledge known to pretty much everyone here. Also, the refuge changes with time, so any general overview would go out of date within a couple thousand days, and some of the specific stuff too."

"So, to recommend you a book, I'd need to know more about what questions you're trying to answer, basically."

Arthur nods along and considers this. It makes sense that the refuge is changing, since it's something that the Hearthkeeper made and is, evidently, continuing to improve on. He guesses that she's probably not planning on ever stepping down or training a replacement, or if she is that it's a long while in the future. Maybe that Ton'guni guy, since he seems like he might be something of a fixture as well. Probably no point in begging her to bring him into the loop on that.

So, what does he want to read about, specifically? "I guess the comparative magic studies would be the best place for me to start, then." Hm... "Also, do you know if there are any, like, big surveys of what people's homeworlds are like?"

Wait, he didn't ever actually answer the question. "I want to try and get a better handle on my power, and I'm hoping that I might be able to read something that gives me an idea on how to do that. I guess, I don't know if you have, like, a phonebook? Or if there's a list of people who might be able to help me directly?"

"We do have surveys like that, yes. I think the most recent one is a couple hundred days old. The people who put those together will probably want to interview you at some point."

"If you want help with your power, I doubt you'll get much useful information out of a book about the magic of some other world than your own. There's very little overlap in terms of the practical skills. Probably Ton'guni is the best person to talk to about that. He can get a lot of information about how your power works, and if that isn't enough, he can probably give you a pretty good idea about where you should investigate from there. But no, we do not have a phonebook. There's only a few hundred of us, usually you just ask around."

And Ulthi can direct him to the best books on comparative magic and comparing the various worlds refugees come from in general.

"Thanks," Arthur offers simply but with genuine appreciation on his face, before heading off in the given direction. He does think he's going to try and pay Ton'guni a visit, or at least try and schedule something since it seems plausible that he might be really busy.

He doesn't know whether this is the sort of library where he can just up and take books away, he knows back home he'd have needed a library card for that, so for now he'll browse the books that he's been pointed towards (and, hopefully the translation effect applies to written language as well as spoken, or else that at least one of this is written in English and in an alphabet he's familiar with), before eventually picking whichever one seemed the most beginner friendly and finding a place to sit and read.

Also, just in case he passes through, he'll keep an eye out for Ton'guni.

So will he, though mostly because he'll be people-watching, and occasionally reading over people's shoulders.

The Refugee Origin World Survey, 57th edition, is a high-level overview of what is known about the homeworlds of every refugee who arrived via the green door that agreed to be interviewed (96%) since the survey was founded (about one hundred thousand days ago). The authors note that both the information on individual worlds as well as the statistics and proposed trends are limited by what the interviewees knew about their homeworlds—many weren't well-educated and/or came from a civilization that didn't have as much knowledge about its world as, for instance, 2024 Earth does—and how much they reliably remember—the survey tries to interview people when they're relatively recently arrived and their memories are fresh, but memories are often fuzzy for what amounts to a lot of trivia. In some cases, they were fortunate enough to be able to supplement with books people brought with them. But very often, the only things the survey knows for certain about a world are the features of it that were relevant to the everyday life of the interviewee, and it's often unclear how much these features apply to the world as a whole, or just the part of it where the interviewee lived. Furthermore, although refugees who passed through the green door together are considered to have the same origin world, there are cases where the origin worlds of refugees who arrived separately cannot be conclusively distinguished (particularly in the case of typical-history Earths) and these cases are counted as separate worlds. Insofar as generalizations can be made, or trends detected, about the origin worlds of refugees, here are some of them.

• 28% of interviewees came from a version of Earth, or a world that has an Earth even if the interviewee didn't live there.
  • 70% of Earths do not have any apparent magic or supernatural phenomena (defined as phenomena that can not plausibly explained by the conventional principles of physics shared by nearly all origin worlds and the refuge itself). For the sake of conciseness, worlds without magic or supernatural phonomena may henceforth be referred to as mundane, and those with as nonmundane.
    • For 14% of Earths that are known to have magic or supernatural phenomena, their existence is unknown to (if not deliberately concealed from) the general public. This suggests that many seemingly-mundane Earths also have unknown or secret magic or supernatural phenomena.
  • All Earths have or had human life. On a few nonmundane Earths, humans have gone extinct or been replaced with posthumans. Additional sapient species are exclusively, but not guaranteed to be, found on nonmundane Earths. In cases where the magic or supernatural phenomena is unknown to the general public, either the existence or sapience of those additional species is also unknown to the general public, even individuals of those species are not themselves magical or supernatural.
    • When additional sapient species do exist, they usually are not reproductively compatible with humans.
    • Although cats are not themselves magical or supernatural, and the testimony of the first generation of cats suggests they came from a seemingly-mundane Earth, it is considered likely that magical or supernatural activity was required to cause cats to become sapient on their homeworld.
  • Among the cases where the survey has been able to establish definitive facts about their history, 92% of mundane Earths and 98% of nonmundane Earths where the advent of magical or supernatural phonomena can be dated to specific point or period of time (rather than said phonomena having existed as long as anyone has known) have a history that diverges from a template, referred to as the typical Earth history. In these cases, the editors of the survey have been able to identify either a specific point of divergence from the typical Earth history (among nonmundane Earths that fit this pattern, that is typically the advent of magic or supernatural phonomena) or a period of time prior to some unknown event during which the history of the world in question is apparently identical to the typical Earth history of the same period.
    • 63% of nonmundane Earths where magical or supernatural phonomena are unknown to the general public have a history substantially similar to the typical Earth history. In some cases events in the typical Earth history that have mundane causes in the typical case are instead caused by the activity of concealed magical/supernatural agents or phenomena.
    • The typical Earth history ends in the year 2030 AD. Past that point, all Earths that we know of diverge from one another. The closer the divergence is to the year 2030, the more extreme it tends to be.
  • Interviewees are more likely to arrive from Earths with calendar years at the time of their departure that are later in the typical Earth history (i.e. more interviewees came from 1900-2000 AD Earths than 1500-1600 AD Earths). The best explanation for the specific distribution observed, in the opinion of the editors, is that origin worlds (this pattern also seems to apply to non-Earths) are evenly distributed across technology level (to a point—there seems to be a maximum technology level for origin worlds), although this is of course dependent on the specifics of how one measures the technology level of various worlds. Moreover, if you include cases where interviewees did not know enough about the state of their planet in general to assess its technology level as a whole, it looks like interviewees themselves are roughly evenly distributed across technology levels.
• 72% of interviewees came from non-Earth worlds. It is rare that two or more non-Earth origin worlds can be confirmed to be versions of one another (in the same way that all Earths are). However, non-Earths do occasionally share similarities (e.g. features of their magic or supernatural phonomena, or species that substantially resemble each other) more often than can be explained by chance. This is also the case for nonmundane Earths, and to a lesser extent, non-Earths and nonmundane Earths considered as a set.
  • 67% of non-Earths are seemingly mundane. Non-Earths with magic or supernatural phenomena unknown to the general public are rare.
    • 14% of nonmundane non-Earths have a spatial configuration that cannot be described as a planet. Essentially each case is unique.
  • Non-Earths are much more likely than chance to have either human (i.e. indistinguishable from the inhabitants of mundane Earths) or humanlike (i.e. distinguishable from humans, but reproductively compatible with them). Non-Earths are also more likely to have sapient species with roughly humanoid body-plans than those without. It is a matter of debate if this rate is greater than can be explained by chance, or the humanoid body plan simply has inherent advantages for terrestrial sapient species.
  • Non-Earths always have (in part if not in entirety) a gravity and atmosphere sufficiently similar to that of the refuge (which itself is highly similar, but not identical, to the typical Earth in these respects) for refugees from those worlds to survive and be comfortable within the refuge.
    • It isn't known if this is an inherent limitation of the door itself, or if the door would appear in more places should the Hearthkeeper make the refuge more hospitable to those accustomed to different atmospheric or gravitational conditions.

One hundred thousand-- they've had this going for over 270 years?!

He's briefly stunned by that fact, before remembering that Ton'guni, and maybe more people besides him and the Hearthkeeper, are either extremely long-lived or just straight up ageless, which makes it feel a bit less crazy.

It's interesting to know what slice of the refuge's demographics he's part of, and clarifies to him how much he should expect random people he meet to have some idea of what a world with powers is like, or of what the tech level he's familiar with is like. He's also curious about why nonmundane non-Earth's are apparently more common among non-Earths than nonmundane Earths are among Earth. Maybe that discrepancy comes down to more Earths having unknown magic, though that still leaves him wondering why Earths would be more prone to not knowing about magic on average.

Regardless, he'll continue reading, now moving onto the comparative magic studies that Ulthi pointed out earlier. He's still intending to try and schedule something with Ton'guni, but he doubts there'll be much harm in him just checking to see if one of these studies happened to include someone whose magic was similar to his power, in case there's even just a nugget of some useful insight.

He'll spend the rest of the day, right up until dinnertime, looking for just such a case, though past the first few hours he might occasionally go down somewhat more entertaining detours, or spend some time taking notes and thinking of questions he wants to ask Ton'guni, or of ways he could introduce himself to people at dinner.

Relatively few origin worlds have had people with what Azzy would call superpowers, and among those, there's not really much information about how they might have learned to control their powers. Plenty of worlds had some kind of magical powers that could be trained to improve one's control of them. Among those cases where the library actually has detailed information about how this process worked, mostly it's either completely different for each magic system, and when they do overlap it seems to be fairly generic meditation stuff. And he can't find any record of anything quite like his powers.

Darn. Oh well, nothing much to be done about it. He'll keep the meditation commonality in mind, he figure Ton'guni will mention it when he talks to him but he doesn't it'd be good to bring it up just in case.

Time passes and he fills up more pages of his notebook, and also maybe does some people-watching as other refugees filter through the library over the next few hours. Then, once it seems like it's dinnertime (going from his phone's clock, if there isn't any other clear signal) he'll start making his way to the great hall.

There's a grandfather clock in the library, but he probably won't miss the librarians and visitors packing up and heading out around eighteen o'clock.

The great hall is much fuller now than it was at lunchtime. It looks like about two hundred people are present.

Huh. He doesn't think he's ever seen a 24-hours grandfather clock before. He normally associates that format with digital clocks. Neat.

And...this is a lot of people to all have in the same room at once. He starts to hang back around the edges without even really thinking about it, and quickly slinks over to the kitchen to think about what he wants for dinner, if anything. Maybe some of the people who like cooking will be making something he can tolerate, and he can just have some of that rather than needing to decide for himself.

Tonight's selection: fresh bread, slices of roast meat (not from an animal that exists on Earth, but it smells good), and roast vegetables—also not a species that exists on Earth, but they look somewhat like squash or pumpkins, with a hard shell surrounding a cavity of soft flesh. If Azzy tries some, he'll find it to have a mild, slightly sweet flavor. Whoever put this together clearly saw the nine separate sauce options as the primary flavor agent for the meal.

He'll give the slices of meat a close look. He's been betrayed by his nose before, and if this doesn't like either white meat or like it's been cured, he'll give it a pass. The roast vegetable seems potentially interesting, and if he can figure out a way to render it totally smooth or extract any tiny little fibers that might be present and leave just the softness with the tools on hand in the kitchen, he'd be happy to spread it on some bread. Otherwise, it'll have to just be bread, perhaps dipped in one of the sauces if any of them seem palatable.

Now equipped with...more of a snack really than a meal, he'll mentally prepare himself for the throng of the great hall, and see if he can a group that looks welcoming. Who was it that James said might be waiting for him? Lebron? If nothing else, maybe he can ask around for him.

The meat has more myoglobin than what's considered white meat on Earth, but less than most red meat. He can find a fine sieve to push the vegetable through if he wants to remove the (valuable dietary) fibers. The sauces come in a great variety of flavors, but all of them are fairly strong, and none are like, completely familiar to Azzy's palate.

If he asks around for 'Lebron', he will be asked if maybe he's looking for Levron, who is over there.

He hopes he's getting enough fiber. He thinks that the pizzas have a decent amount, but he should double check the nutrition facts the next time he makes one. Assuming the boxes have accurate facts, which he doesn't really know for certain. Maybe he should just add it to the list of things to mention to Ton'guni whenever he manages to get that appointment.

Ah! Yeah, Levron, not Lebron. He'll thank whoever corrected him, then head for Levron and see if there's a reasonable place for him to sit nearby for a conversation.

Levron is the same old man he saw playing cards the night he arrived. One of the cats is there too, and an old woman, stocky, with two curved horns, and clearly not human. There are several open chairs at their table, and when Azzy approaches, Levron waves him over.

Ooh, horns. Very nice. He waves back and quickly heads over and takes a seat. "I heard from James earlier today that you were looking for me?"

"Indeed! I do not usually have to wait so long to meet our new arrivals, and I am quite curious. My name is Levron Garabedian."

"I'm Ora," says the cat, a calico. She makes perfectly normal cat vocalizations, which Azzy effortlessly recognizes as language. Also, cat language apparently has a built-in convention for mapping cat vocalizations into human vocalizations, which is why she has a human-pronounceable name instead of, like 'meomrrmrmr'*.

"Lydiar Kovrino," says the woman. She has a smooth, low voice.

* (Not really a faithful rendition of cat language, which encodes a lot of information via prosody.)

Azzy chuckles and flushes a bit in embarrassment. "Yeah, sorry about that! My angel-- err. So, I come from a nonmundane Earth, where people have been developing superpowers for the last 24-ish years, and I have one, sort of. I call it my angel, and it just kind of does stuff on its own, moving things around and the like. It's...been acting strangely ever since I entered the refuge, and it managed to get into enough trouble that the Hearthkeeper offered to dilate the time in my room until she'd figured out a way to keep it from getting into even more trouble, which I was very gracious to accept. She let me know that the work was done earlier today, which is when I met James and Tasha. Anyway! It's good to meet you, Levron, Ora, Lydiar."

He pauses for a moment and almost starts eating before remembering to actually introduce himself. "And you can call me Azzy."

"Welcome to the refuge, Azzy. How are you finding it so far?"

"Uh. Well, from my perspective it's still only my first day, so I'm kind of still settling in. Trying to sort out my feelings about the angel situation from everything else...I guess it's going pretty well? It's nice to not have to worry about the bull-- I was between a rock and a hard place, sort of. And now I'm not!"

"I would be interested to know what your life was like before, and what your world was like in general. Although, ah, if you don't want to say anything, we won't mention it again. Some refugees have very good reason not to want to speak of the events that brought them here, as I'm sure you can imagine."

"I don't think I mind? I don't know if my life was all that interesting, and I wasn't exactly like, a scholar or anything..."

And he'll go ahead and and give a basic description of his world. History prior the year 2000 seems to be Typical, to those familiar with it, while divergence therefrom has been mostly limited to an explosion of organized crime in the form of small super-gangs which in the last few years have begun to coalesce into larger alliances that are challenging the ability of many governments across the world to enforce the law, with an accompanying precipitous drop in government approval ratings more or less globally. He'll also give an overview of the super-gangs in Chicago, their politics, the superpowers of their headliners, that sort of thing. As questions come up, he'll do his best to answer, though he's cagey about the particulars of his life.

"So these people with superpowers have mostly been using their powers for crime?"

He raises a hand and tilts it side to side. "Sort of? Some of them are definitely mostly doing, like, crime-crime, especially the ones that formed up around old pre-incident gangs. But a lot of them are just people trying to use their powers to keep themselves and their family and friends safe, to take control of their lives, that sort of thing, at least in my experience." He shrugs. "I never hung around with one for too long, since even the nicest still expect a lot from supers who join up with them since they're all desperate for manpower, though, so my information about what life's like for people live on the inside of it all is limited."

"Ah, I thought perhaps the state had attracted some of them to assist it in upholding the law. Or even that some might have loftier ambitions than protecting kith and kin or enriching themselves... though it may be for the best if they don't."

Azzy shrugs. "Maybe some? But at least as far as I saw, people who joined up with the cops or the army ended up disappearing for one reason or another. Maybe they got recruited to be secret agents, or abducted and used for human experiments if you put stock in the conspiracy theories. And some people definitely had big ambitions, but if they and their buddies had the powers to match then they usually ended up going bigger scale than even the big names in the city. Going out to the middle of nowhere and being their own little government kind of stuff. I don't really know the details, I never went out and looked for myself and the news wasn't exactly unbiased on that front."

"Censorship?" asks Lydiar.

"Maybe? Or just perverse incentives. The news makes their money by selling their audience's attention, and nobody's paying them to have people look at stuff that doesn't make money."

Ora speaks up.

"Do people ever get powers that let them influence the minds of others, or learn information they wouldn't otherwise have?"

"People definitely get powers that have an informational component, though there isn't anybody who has, like, legit precognition or mind-reading. Not that I've heard, anyway. And, I knew someone who could mess with your emotions, and I've heard of a guy who could mess with how perceived the world around you, if either of those count?"

"Messing with how you perceive the world around you to what extent?"

He shrugs. "Don't really know. That guy was bad news according to everybody I ever heard from, so I mostly just tried to keep my ear to the ground in case he came to town but didn't go looking too far into it."

"Understandable."

"I suspect the survey crew are going to be disappointed with what you can tell them." He smiles a little. "Then again, they usually are."

Azzy slumps and sighs a bit, with a mixture of faux and genuine dejection. "Oh well."

"Eh, they're always hoping to get enough data to conclusively establish how various events affect the course of history. Which is actually rather ambitious of them, and most of the people they interview don't know enough to give them that data. I wouldn't worry about it if I were you."

He isn't great at not worrying about things, but he'll try. "Fair enough."

Then after having another bite of bread with mystery-vegetable spread, he gets a brief look of realization. Once he's swallowed he asks, "So, I've heard about the refuge's doc, Ton'guni, might also be the best person to ask about where to start on getting some better control over my power. How would I go about setting up an appointment with him? Or just finding him, really."

"I can show you where his office is when you're done eating. He has a sign on the door that says when he's busy. Usually either he's available for walk-ins, or he's working on something but can make an appointment, and if he can't talk to you at all the door will tell you when to come back."

"You can also sometimes find him here at dinnertime, but not consistently."

Levron briefly looks around.

"He's not here now."

Azzy nods along. He's not sure he'd want to talk about this sort of thing over dinner anyway. "Anything I should be on the look out to tell if I'm getting close to his office? Like with the library."

"Oh, it's close enough to the great hall that the route there is pretty stable. Down that hallway, take the second left, then look for the sign on his door. I was going to show you there so I could explain what the sign is trying to tell you, but it's not difficult to navigate there."

Azzy sets down his bread for a moment to bring out the notebook and pencil he brought with him to add a brief transcription of the directions as short as they are. It wouldn't do to forget, and he's managed to forget simpler things.

"Thanks for thinking of me." He looks to be putting them away when he's interrupted by another look of realization. "Oh! Another thing I was kind of surprised and curious about: when I met her over lunch earlier, Tasha also mentioned that some of the cats are good 'matchmakers'?"

"Ah, yes, there are always some cats who like to talk to people and gossip, and they gather enough information to make pretty good guesses about who would be a good idea to introduce to whom. Not that there aren't plenty of other people who like to talk to people and gossip"—he smirks—"but they seem to be the most... systematic about it. These days, I believe it's mostly Pakhet, Ryuka, and Argent... Ora, am I missing anyone?"

"Minori recently became their apprentice. They'll probably introduce themselves to you eventually, Azzy, but if you'd like to meet them sooner than that I can let them know."

He scribbles down the names and a reminder to himself about them in his notebook as he nods along. "I don't know. They sound like they've got their own thing going on, it feels weird to try and jump ahead if they've probably got their own idea of when and how to make contact." The blush appearing on his cheeks might indicate there's a significant elements of embarrassment or shame involved in his decision making as well. His eyes' briefly darting around, as if scanning for something, might hint at some fear as well.

"Very well."

He eats his way through the rest of his bread-and-spread quietly and maybe a little mechanically, before he remembers one more question. "James also mentioned stuff like hobby groups being how most people spend their time, but I didn't really have a hobby before I got here, so I was wondering if you might have a recommendation for a group that's open to someone who's kind of starting from square one?"

"Off the top of my head, there's the fashionable society—they collect clothes and do sewing and tailoring—the engineering group, several book clubs and scholarly associations... a lot of people do cooking and some of them would probably be happy to teach you, and the library proper is always eager for volunteers, although I don't know if you'd consider that work a hobby. What else... there's refuge football. I had a lot of fun doing that when I was younger." He chuckles. "It's a game that's full of surprises. And of course many of us enjoy playing games in here in the evenings—cards, mahjong, chess, yul'ma, that kind of thing."

Lydiar chimes in.

"Some of us get together every couple of days for martial arts. Mostly grappling. Nothing very formal. There are a lot of other sports that people play sometimes, but none are as popular as football."

"There are probably plenty of other things I'm forgetting, because they aren't very popular or only happen sporadically or both. And many I can think of which would not be the most open to a newcomer, but you could probably get into if you really wanted to. I think most of the refuge's musicians, for instance, knew how to play an instrument before they arrived, but you probably could get someone to teach you if you really wanted. It just wouldn't be as straightforward as the other options we mentioned."

Azzy considers the options presented. He doesn't think he has the wherewithal for picking up an instrument, if his recollection of piano lessons and music class in school are any indication. He's simultaneously attracted and a bit worried about refuge soccer, since it'd be nice to have something to do that burns some of his energy, but it being 'surprising' sounds like it might also be a bit unpleasant for him, and might provoke the angel. The mention of card games does make him think. "Do you know if there's a roleplaying game group? For, like, D&D, if that's a thing people know about?"