She finds herself back in her library at home, everything is just as she remembers it. An unfamiliar woman in jeans and a light purple blouse is sitting cross-legged on the floor next to one of the shelves perusing the titles on the shelf.

Weird.

She reaches out to the woman, trying to read her mind. (Everyone's brains are cut open, exposed to her, in her dreams lately.)

The woman thinks of herself as Addy, short for adventure, she had another name once but she doesn't use it anymore. She is genuinely curious about the books on the shelf but she's also waiting for River to speak to her. She's hoping that River will be a friend, and also that Addy can help. Addy knows about where River is.

"Addy," she says out loud.

"Hello River." She smiles softly, "You've been having a pretty awful time lately. I hope that I can help, if nothing else you won't be having any more nightmares."

"Where are we?"

"I call this place the dreamscape. It's something in between a dream and a physical place. Your mind will come here whenever you fall asleep now."

"Can I leave through it?"

Addy sighs softly. "Yes and no... You can enter the dreamscape physically, but you're the tether that ties the dreamscape to your world. If you come in, you may never be able to find your world again."

"Oh."

"I still want to see my family again."

"I hope we can make that happen." Addy smiles a bit. "Being a tether means you can bring some things back with you to the waking world. Given time and practice I think you'll be able to escape."

"Good."

"Are there weapons here?"

"I'm not sure that's the best approach but, yes." Addy holds out her hand and a knife fades into view, it looks more ornamental than practical. The handle has intricate engravings of flowers with an appropriately colored gem forming the center of each flower. "With practice you can manifest just about anything here."

"I'm good at weapons."

Addy frowns, "It's a little sad that someone your age has had cause to acquire those skills." She closes one eye briefly then the other. "Do you want to start working on escaping right away? Time is a bit strange here, it's ok to take time to relax."

She thinks.

She needs to escape, needs needs needs it, knows she's going insane and in an unhelpful way -

But -

Some normalcy might help, too. Might ease back some of her sanity. Some of her ability to plan, because right now all that's in her head is other people's heads and her screaming murderous thoughts, a billion ways she could rip them open -

She looks around.

She's in a library.

"I want to read," she says, sounding distant to her own ears.

"Then we'll read for a while, you have some books here I haven't read before." Addy finds and selects a science textbook.

She goes and finds a psychology book.

The books aren't like books in dreams. They're real, the same books she had in her family's library -

She pauses in reading the psychology book. It's not very good, and she read it as a kid. She flips to the back, where the references are.

Can she make some of these books, the ones she's never read?

When Addy made the knife she visualized it very clearly both inside and out, and then filled up the image with a particular sort of mental energy. Addy was deliberately filled it slowly so as not to startle her.

It doesn't seem like the same technique would work for a book she doesn't know the words to.

"How do I make books I only know the title and author of?" River asks.

Addy looks up from her book. "That's actually pretty hard, the magic of the dreamscape is overwhelming visual. If you've seen the book you can pull the details through your tether." In her mind Addy is focusing on a gossamer strand of something anchored inside herself that's connected to something a bit like a faded balloon floating off in a direction that isn't any of the physical ones. Addy builds the image of a book in her head then connects the book to that strand and makes a vacuum inside the book, something a bit like the energy that made the knife real flows into the book from the balloon and Addy is holding a book. River also has a gossamer strand like that but hers is taught and she can't immediately sense what it's connected to. "Don't try to follow your tether," Addy warns, "if you do, you'll probably wake up."

"Right."

She hasn't seen most of the listed books. She frowns at the pages. "Can I make a library I've visited, even if I don't know all the books in it?"

Addy smiles, "Yes, you made this room subconsciously, making places after the first one takes a bit of practice though, and it's really much easier to do it from outside a created space." Addy starts to concentrate. Reaching out mentally to touch River then stops herself. "Is it alright if I move us out of this room?"

"Sure."

Addy goes back to concentrating and pulls herself and River in one of those non-physical directions. The library disappears and in its wake there's a softly lit expanse of white. There's a floor beneath them which is tinted slightly differently but there are no shadows and there's just empty whiteness in all other directions. "This is how I present the spaces between spaces. It's a lot easier to change non-places like this." With a small bit of visualization and a correspondingly small amount of the increasingly familiar mental energy Addy changes the floor to a periwinkle color. "Why don't you try?"

She tries making red dots on the floor.

There are red dots on the floor. "Good job."

She tries to make a table. 

That's harder but with effort it's doable.

And food on top of the table? Simple things to start with, or - simple in her head -

She wants an apple.

It takes a little work, remembering what an apple tastes like will also help. Eventually though, an apple appears.

Addy waits patiently, wondering what River is going to do next.

She eats the apple, of course.

It tastes like an apple should. Depending on how carefully she imagined it other details might be off.

She makes a pile of foods they wouldn't let her have because they might conflict with the latest regimen - all very carefully imagined - and laughs.

Addy smiles and copies some of the food to try it herself. If River is paying attention to her mind she'll feel Addy doing the same vacuum trick as with the book except connecting to the piece of food River created instead of to a tether.

She kind of can't not pay attention to minds.

She tries using the vacuum trick to duplicate a candy bar.

That works, Addy is happily munching away.

Nom nom nom.

"So how do I make a building from here?" she asks between bites.

"To copy a place from your world you need to provide a locus by imagining at least part of that place in some detail and then building a rough framework of what the rest of the place will be the pull the rest of the detail through your tether."

Putting actions to her words. Addy imagines her childhood home, the focus of her imagining, the locus is on her old room, with details like the feeling of the blankets, the bounciness of her mattress, the kind of wood her desk was made of, the feeling of the carpet under bare feet. Further out she's more abstract she makes it clear that she wants all the rooms of the house and the yard out to a hundred meters. Then she attaches it to her tether and lets it fill out the rest of the details. For something so large it will take a couple minutes to fill.

She observes this, closely.

"Is it safe to use my tether for that, or might I wake up?"

"It's safe to connect your tether to things, the two things you need to avoid are following your tether back to your waking self or pulling directly on your tether with enough sustained force to bring your body into the dreamscape. It would be really difficult to do the second though, it takes sustained effort, it's rather painful and I'm watching to make sure you don't." 

"Alright."

She starts trying to make her favorite public library. It's one of the few with an actual extensive collection of physical books, not just computers and such. She starts with the little nook she loves best, the smell of paper and the smooth feel of a paperback, the cushion underneath her and the wall behind her and the warmth from the light shining through the window - the whir of the climate control, the freshness of the air - spiraling out to the facade, slowly, more dreamlike.

When she connects her tether it will start to slowly fill. If she focuses she can tell that it's going to take around eight minutes to complete. She can also dip her mind into the stream of details but it's a chaotic flow of sights, sounds, tastes and smells, including the tastes of some things not meant for human consumption.

She backs out of the sense stream after tasting carpet.

Eight minutes is fine - she can keep munching on her stack of treats.

Addy continues nibbling away as well. Her childhood home finishes filling first. It manifests as a portal in hovering near Addy.

"Can I explore your place while I'm still filling in the library?"

"It might be a little harder to keep your focus while you're exploring but I think you'll be fine, and I can make sure you don't lose your connection."

"Okay!"

And off to explore it is.

The portal brings them to Addy's old bedroom. The walls are painted a rich forest green, there's a large closet along one wall. Her bed is up against the opposite wall and it has a pile of pillows, blankets and stuffed animals on it. The windows along the left wall look out onto the backyard, there's a treehouse clearly visible. The desk and a dresser, both made out of wood and painted white are along the same wall as the door.

She spins around.

It looks - normal.

So... So very normal.

She starts laughing, helplessly.

Addy smiles widely. It's good that River is starting to relax.

The laughter seems to be getting a bit hysterical, actually.

Addy's smile disappears. She considers trying to physically comfort River but that seems unwise for someone traumatized. Instead she just says, "Everything will be alright. It'll take time but things will turn out alright." She mostly believes what she's saying. She has niggling doubts but in the worst case River's tether will pull her into the dreamscape if her body dies.

"It's not! It's not alright now!"

"No, it isn't. The things they've done to you are horrific and they'll always be with you. Once you're away from the monsters doing these things, and with enough time I do believe you'll be able to heal, but it isn't going to be easy and it's going to take a long time."

'Maybe...' Addy thinks but doesn't say, 'Maybe someone else should have greeted River'

"Who else is there?"

"Oh, I keep forgetting you're a mind reader." She chuckles a bit hollowly. "There's a bunch of people in the dreamscape but mostly it's just a few of us that interact with new people. There's Emma, who's an empath and has her own history of trauma, though not as bad as yours, she made the dreamscape. Sen's more focused on being a teacher, mostly physical skills and meditation she was a spy and later a diplomat when she was alive, Lib tends to the dreamscape's main library, she's also just about the only person who can find things there. And then there's Cray, but she's something of an acquired taste and she's not allowed to greet new people unless we're really sure they'll like her."

She nods. "I like you. So far."

"I'm glad, I like you too. I want to do everything I can for you." She pauses for a moment, "If your telepathy is involuntary we could probably help with that, at least while you're here, the waking world is harder."

"It's involuntary. I see everything in everyone's heads."

"That must be overwhelming, do you want me to try to help? Emma's more experienced but I've picked up some things over the years."

"I don't want to stop right now. Maybe sometime." Right now she's still not sure Addy's safe.

"Alright, just let me know." Addy correctly surmises that's the reason.

"Is there anything other than this room here?"

"Yeah, it's the whole house, and the yard."

She nods and goes to explore.

There's another bedroom opposite this one though it's pretty sparsely decorated, and a third right next to it also pretty sparse. There's also a rather nicely appointed bathroom.

After that there's a staircase before the hallway continues.

Hmmm...

She runs down the staircase.

The bottom of the staircase is right in front of a door to the outside made out of mahogany wood, there's thin floor length windows to either side that show a bit of the porch and of a yard with a few trees and flowerbeds. To the right there's a formal sitting room with rather upscale furniture there's a closed the door at the end. To the left there's a larger room with an impressive looking speaker setup and a variety of small couches, some tables and some chairs surrounding a small dance floor. Behind her there's a hallway.

What's through the closed door in the sitting room?

A formal dining room with a crystal chandelier hanging above a table with 12 chairs, there's cabinets in each of the day corners with plates and glasses. Between them there's a buffet made of a dark wood with several drawers and two cabinets. The left wall has larger windows that give a better view of the front yard. There's more trees and flowerbeds visible from here and you can also see a road beyond the yard. Beyond that is an endless white expanse.

The right wall has a few paintings and another door.

She heads for the outside.

The front door opens easily enough. The porch is tiled with stone slabs. There are stone steps down to the yard, and a brick pathway leading from those steps to the driveway. The grass is a lush green and on both sides of the path there are flower beds with a riotous mix of colors. Behind the flowers there's a short relatively thin tree that splits in three right at ground level. To the right about even with the end of the house there's a birch tree, to past the thin tree there's a studier tree that looks climbable. To the left there's an pine tree that reaches up what must be at least three stories next to the driveway.

She heads over to the climbable tree, scampering up.

The lowest branches are just within reach of her hands so she'll need to pull herself up and then after that there's a variety of routes she can easily get even with the second story windows without much trouble, past that the branches are a bit thin.

She climbs up to the level of the second story windows, then hangs out, laughing.

Addy watches from the porch.

Of course, her library settles, and River gets restless.

She scampers back down, being not all that cautious of falling.

"Do you want to visit the library now? I think you might be able to get there without my help but I can move us or make a portal if you'd prefer."

"I'd like to try by myself."

Addy carefully doesn't think of exactly how to accomplish the move in case River wants to figure it out for herself.

Well, she felt Addy making that portal earlier... She tries making one to her library.

That works, "Nice job. You're really picking this up quickly."

"Feeling you do it helps."

"I'm sure it does." She laughs, then gestures towards the portal. "After you."

She steps through, and immediately runs off to find the section on psychology.

Addy follows, and goes off to browse the engineering section.

She reads quickly - astonishingly so - and very soon has a small mountain of books around her at a study table, on psychology and psychic talents and ESP and pharmacology and anatomy of the brain.

Addy, in the meantime is reading through physics and engineering books, trying to notice any differences in physics and absently designing concealable weaponry. She's also occasionally checking in on River using dream magic. If River seems to be at a stopping point she'll walk over.

Getting essentially two streams of vision to read books with is interesting. River seems able to keep up with what Addy's reading and her own books, at least. The dream magic is interesting, too, and River gradually brings herself to a stopping point.

Addy wraps up her own reading and walks over once she notices River is finished. "Did you find what you were looking for?"

"Have the books I want."

"Is there anything in particular that you expect those books to help with?"

"Figuring out my brain."

"I hope they help. If there's anything I can do, please just ask."

Small smile. "I will."

"Is there anything you'd like to do right now or are you hoping to take a break?"

"Maybe a break?"

"Alright, would it be better if I moved out of your range? It must be overwhelming always having other people in your head."

"My range is pretty big, and - I'm getting used to it. And I think I might like feeling people, anyways..."

"I was going to move to a different dreamspace; I think your range only extends in physical directions. I'm happy to stay if that's what you want though. Would you prefer to have some quiet time or would you like to play a game or explore some more?"

"A game sounds fun. Though it'd have to be one I can't just cheat at."

"I can think of two games off the top of my head, Zilch and Fast Scrabble are both games where you're competing but you aren't strategizing against your opponent. Zilch is a game with dice and weighing risks. Fast scrabble is a game about vocabulary and thinking quickly."

"Fast Scrabble sounds fun."

"We'll do that then." Addy finds a table and conjures a set of Scrabble tiles. "We each start with 15 tiles, you need to create words that all connect together by sharing letters. When you use up all your tiles you say draw and both of us take another tile. The person who uses up all their tiles first when there are no tiles left in the draw pile wins. Any questions?"

"If you put down a tile, can I use it in a word?"

"Nope, our boards are totally separate." 

"So a bit different from the Scrabble I'm used to... If I don't have letters for a word, can I call for a draw?"

"If both of us are stuck we can draw even if neither of us are done, otherwise you wait, or you rearrange the tiles you already have."

"Okay. I'm willing to try, then."

"Yay!" Addy pulls fifteen tiles towards her and once River does the same she says "Start," then flips over her tiles and starts arranging them into words.

River's good at this game. She's fast, and speeds up as she goes, and it distracts her from the constant flow of Addy's mind.

Addy is fairly fast too, she's played this game hundreds of times, but as the game goes on it's clear that River is saying "Draw" distinctly more often. Emily doesn't mind losing at all.

Winning is quite fun.

River's not that graceful a winner. A bit too smug. But she has a lot of fun.

If River is happy Addy is happy. Winning can be fun but, the point is enjoying time with a friend. "Do you want to play again?"

"Yeah!"

To save time Addy banishes the tiles and conjures a new set of randomly shuffled tiles. And thus another game begins.

She's content to play a few more rounds before she feels rested enough to go back to her reading.

"Thanks. This was fun."

"I had fun too. What would you like to do next?"

"I think I wanna read more, now."

"Alright, let me know if you need anything." Addy smiles then walks away, her thoughts returning to the physics and engineering problems she was playing with before.

"Okay."

And River goes back to reading for a while.

Addy reads a bit more herself before deciding that she's read enough. She pushes a bit more reality into the area in front of her forcing it to strictly obey the physics of River's world. Then she constructs several types of batteries at a molecular level and starts running them through tests.

Putting more reality into an area is interesting, as is making something at that level of detail. River's head is getting too full of psychology. Maybe she can find a chemistry book on explosives... 

She finds several that could be useful. But she doesn't want to blow up the library, so - "Addy?"

Addy freezes her test area in time, there's a mirror at the boundary a consequence of how light isn't allowed in or out, and then says. "Hi, do you want to take another break?"

"I want to learn more about changing the dreamscape."

"Awesome... is there anything in particular you'd like to learn?"

"Changing how real things are? Time?"

"Sure, outside of an imported space like this library the dreamscape is extremely malleable, it follows our expectations rather than the laws of physics. If you want something to happen hard enough it just happens unless there's someone else who doesn't want it to happen. Here inside the library and other places copied from a world the physics of that world is mostly obeyed. There is a bit more flexibility around the edges both literally and metaphorically. For example there's electricity powering the lights and climate control even though you didn't explicitly include a power station in your specification. This place needs electricity to match your understanding of it so it has electricity. It's also really easy for someone experienced with dream magic, or with the kind of prestigious talent that you have to unintentionally change things in subtle ways to go a little bit more how you want them to. What I was doing to make the world more real was to pull a little more deeply from your tether and carve out a part of the library so that only intentional dream magic can change things. It's more of a guardrail than anything. Does that make sense?"

"Yeah! It sounds fun."

"As for freezing time... you have to choose a visualization or a pattern of thought that works for you. Personally I imagine an unusually shaped bobble, a kind of time freezing from a book I read. That's why my work area is all mirrored. The dreamscape is really flexible."

"Bobble?" she asks, mostly to prompt Addy to think about it.

"Bobbles are something that people could create in a book called the Peace War by Vernor Vinge. Like I said, it let people freeze things in time." In her mind she's remembering cool tricks like freezing the top floor of a building and the surrounding hot air of a midsummer's day so that when night fell the top floor literally floated away. She's also remembering using millions of tiny bobbles to shred a tree.

"They sound neat."

"They are, they're one of my favorite fictional technologies. They have so many potential uses and implications. In one of the other stories by the author they're used to stop tornados."

She giggles. "That seems really unlikely."

"Well, it's not easy to do it but it worked after my 50th test. You need to have something to anchor the air and to bobble a large enough volume of air. It's a complicated and delicate process."

That gets a proper laugh. "It seems fun to test!"

"It was! That's the best part of the dreamscape... if I want to run an experiment I can just run it. Even if it's ludicrously resource intensive or requires different laws of physics or magic."

"I'll wanna play with that."

"Of course."

"What's a good place to start?"

"If you're going to get into serious experimentation the first thing to do is to create a safety exception for yourself." Addy pulls her own safety exception to the front of her mind. It's a list of rules for things like capping acceleration and jerk applied to any part of her body, capping the maximum electromagnetic intensity, and a bunch of other bits of minutiae. "The safety exception isn't strictly necessary but it can be pretty traumatic to feel yourself being seriously injured and that sort of thing is likely to make you wake up instinctively."

"Oh, that's smart..." she says, picking apart Addy's thoughts on it.

"Yeah... Emma had to put me back together a couple times when I hurt myself too badly." Addy carefully doesn't think about the details of those experiences.

"That doesn't sound fun."

"It wasn't..." Addy says in a low voice. Then she brightens, "But you can learn from my mistakes, and have fun safely experimenting. I think the next step in actually experimenting is learning to bookmark the state of an area. That makes iteration a lot easier."

"Okay. How do I do that?"

"The way I do it is kinda visualize a timeline and then note the current time and mark it with a flag. The specifics aren't too important you just need to indicate to the dreamscape that this state is important so it remembers it. Then you can use the same visualization or schema to tell the dreamscape to return to that state." Addy puts actions to those words and bookmarks the current time for the full library. Then she turns the table green. She waits a couple seconds and then reaches out for the bookmark and opens it which changes the table back.

She focuses, and tries to do the same thing, this time turning the table red.

She succeeds. "You've got it."

She makes a happy noise.

"So, was there anything in particular you wanted to experiment with?"

"Explosions under different conditions! Especially if I can figure out how to play around with the nuclear forces..."

"Atomic explosions are an exciting place to start. I have several designs for fission and fusion weapons. You can also directly play around on an atomic scale if you prefer."

"Oooo, fission and fusion sounds fun! Probably best to start with normal physics?"

"All physics is normal, but if you'd prefer chemical explosions we can start with either traditional explosives like C4 or more exotic compounds like FOOF."

"Atomic seems funnest."

"Would you prefer to have a bomb design or play with things at the atomic scale?"

"Play around, I think..."

"Would you prefer to start with fission or fusion?"

"Hmmmm... Fusion."

Addy conjures a canister with a mix of Deuterium and Tritium. "This is probably the easiest form of fusion to start with. The key is to push together one Deuterium atom and one Tritium atom with enough force to make them fuse. It's a good exercise in focusing down to the atomic scale."

"Anywhere special we should do this?"

"Fusing a few atoms here and there is pretty hard to notice at the macroscopic scale. If you wanted to fuse that whole canister at once it'd still be fine with a checkpoint and our safeties but I can also make a more fitting environment if you want ambiance."

"Let's go for ambiance. Mad science deserves it."

"Well then. To testing area 17!" Addy move the two of them to one of her testing areas. There are bright red lights shining from red spirals on the gunmetal ceiling at least twenty meters above their heads. Before them is globe which is gently pulsing with a dim white light, at the center of the circular room. The floor is an industrial grating, if there is a floor below that it is lost in shadow. In the center of the ceiling there's a tremendous glass window occasionally lit by a silent thunderstorm above.

She laughs. "Very properly atmospheric! I need a lab coat, and then we can do science!" She makes a lab coat - not white, the idea gives her a shiver, but bright cherry red with little flairs at the bottom.

Addy makes a matching coat for herself. "Alright, then, one second while I set up." Addy replaces the ordinary air in the orb in front of them with the same deuterium tritium mix found in the canister she made in the library. "There, an orb is much more dignified than a canister and you can also get some visual feedback. Oh, also the floor here is indestructible so it won't disappear from under us, the walls and ceiling can't fall on us either." 

"Sweet."

And she tries pushing the atoms together.

The atoms fuse, there is now a helium atom and a neutron flying apart. "You got it, maybe we should slow down time, it's a bit hard to see how it all works in real time."

Heeee. "Alright!"

Addy slows down time to a hundredth the normal speed, "Feel free to try again."

And: boom!

Addy watches happily, she's glad River is enjoying herself.

She is having a rather excellent amount of fun causing and observing explosions!

Addy causes a few of her own.

It's even more fun with two - River starts syncing her explosions with Addy's in interesting patterns.

Addy works to make the patterns more complex and intricate.

Then they'll have quite the show going on soon enough.

Addy's more than willing to keep going as long as River wants.

She does eventually get a bit - somewhere between tired and bored.

When Addy notices she starts winding things down. "That was fun."

"Yeah! A lot."

"We can do it more another time if you like."

"I think I would!"

"Then we will. In the meantime, it might make sense to turn our attention back to your situation outside the dreamscape."

"Yeah."

"I'm sorry for bringing it back up, we do need to figure out what you want to do though. As I see it, the key to breaking out is going to be learning to manifest dreamscape magic outside of the dreamscape. Unfortunately it's really hard to learn that inside the dreamscape. Maybe your telepathy will provide an end run around that though. The easiest magics to manifest are changes to your own sensoria, the first one we tend to teach allows those like yourself to talk with us while you're outside."

"If it's internally consistent how to do it I should be able to just read you thinking about it, yeah."

"Alright, it should be pretty similar, though different worlds push back on dreamscape magic differently." She enters her memory palace and spends a bit of time moving around until she finds the right memory and then immerses herself in it. First, she remembers how the tether feels from the other side, while in the dreamscape the tether is something of a steady anchor, it adds a subtle feeling of weight. Outside the dreamscape though Addy remembers the tether making her feel lighter and larger, like she's filled with helium and trying to both expand and float upward, except the direction isn't upward it's in a non-physical direction. Then she remembers turning her focus to her memory palace. She does something a bit like pushing reality into an area only instead of pulling from the tether on the physical world within the dreamscape she'd pushing the dreamscape into her memory palace, making it more a realm of pure ideas and less a manifestation of firing neurons. Unlike in the dreamscape there's something that pushes back, trying to resist the imposition. It feels like there are weights tied to her limbs slowing her movements and making every action harder. The sensation persists like that for a little while before she wins the battle of wills. Once it does, she builds a representation of herself within the memory palace. Then she conjures a string and feeds one end through her tether until she feels a gentle tugging on the other end. Finally she attaches the string to a tin can and fixes the tin can to float beside the head of her representation. "Hi Emma," she says.

Then Addy pulls out of the memory.

"I should be able to do that..."

"If you can that's great. The next thing I did was to improve my memory. It might be more useful to get better control over your experience of telepathy though, and that's also something you could practice here."

"Yeah. The telepathy's - hard."

"A good starting place would be to figure out how you'd like for it to work. Do you have a sense of what your best possible outcome is?"

"Not really."

"Can you describe what's bad about how it currently works? Or do you have a sense for what's bad even if you can't describe it to another person?"

"...It doesn't turn off. It's everything all at once. It's - loud."

"Is it something like..." Addy imagines a snatches of voices and wisps of thought flooding towards her from three different people, with a rough sense of who each thought is coming from. Addy is also loosely considering trying to copy River's telepathy wholesale to be better able to help. She can checkpoint herself and Emma would put her back together worst case.

"Not exactly. Kind of like - everyone's shouting constantly, and they're shouting all their thoughts, and I can see every visual thought but I don't have extra eyes so it's all jumbled up on my own sight, and I don't know who's thinking what unless I'm focusing on them. I get everything."

That's uncomfortable to even contemplate, Addy finds the crispness and clarity of sensation to be one of the most important things, she's modified her mind and senses to increase that. "That's awful. I think if I was building telepathy from scratch I'd want it to be something like..." She imagines a sorta sense of where nearby people are relative to her and approximately what they're feeling. Then she imagines reaching out and opening up a person's thoughts with a clear distinction between what is and is not thoughts. "Would that be good?"

"Maybe."

"I can try to assemble that for myself if you're comfortable with me having telepathy, so you'd have some sense of what that would be like." She's also considering asking someone else to come over and limiting the telepathy to exclude River if that would make her more comfortable. Also Emma is better at making telepathy powers specifically.

"I don't mind people reading my mind."

"Alright, I'll give it a try then." Addy first reaches out to Emma and leaves a note indicating that she's experimenting with her mind. She gets back a wordless acknowledgement. Then Addy creates a checkpoint for her mind.

With both of those safety measures complete she starts to build the new sense, she reaches into a library of sorts inside her mind and finds a directional sense she played with previously and unpacks and fiddles with it to indicate where people are. She adds a second overlay to that sense that will translate people's emotions into colors. She leaves the inputs to that hanging for a moment.

She reached out into a collective memory of sorts for the vague outline of a telepathy power. The outline handles identifying people's minds and making them available to have things done with that information. She digs into that outline and finds a hook for people's emotional state and attaches that to the sense she's building. Finally she finds hooks for verbal and visual thoughts and ties them into visual and auditory overlays of the sort that can be seen/heard through and ties them to a mental trigger.

With the power complete she runs it through a safety check she pulls from the collective memory and then finally grafts it onto her mind with a time limit of half an hour.

Immediately she can feel River's position relative to her.

River's curious about what Addy's doing, and rapidly assimilating it into other things she's learned. She's considering how she wants her telepathy to work. She should be able to turn every part of it off, sometimes...

Addy opens up her read of River, it doesn't seem to cause a feedback loop thankfully. She's glad she's provided a model for River to work from.

Her mind isn't a library, neatly organized and labeled - it's an ever shifting storm, a river of color and light and sound, and everyone in the world is part of the same waterway and their minds are like ripples -

Her mind is a vortex. It's a contained storm system, and she can spin it up into its own little shell, protected, or she can reach out, brush other people's ripples...

That's a little overwhelming but it's also super cool.

She's glad Addy likes it!

Addy plays around a little with her new power making tweaks around the edges to how it presents and exactly how it feels trying to make it just right. She's planning to keep it for a while.

River keeps playing at well, adjusting until she can shut off all her telepathy, or only parts of it, or until she can get only part of someone's thoughts.

Addy is glad her example is proving helpful.

And River turns off her telepathy, and her head's quiet, it's just her own thoughts for the first time in a year - 

She starts laughing.

Addy smiles widely, and closes off her read on River. It seems more polite that way.

"Is it always like this?"

"I stopped reading your mind, I can start again if you want. If you mean is the dreamscape always this convenient then yes."

"And - things being quiet. I'd... Forgotten."

"That too. I think you held up pretty well but nobody should be subjected to that."

"Yeah."

"We'll get you out. Nobody will ever be able to do that to you again."

"Thanks."

"You're welcome."

"So where do we start?"

"I should probably introduce you to Libby, she's been doing research on your world. I don't know what she's found out as of yet but it's probably helpful for planning. If nothing else, she'll have read through the records of the people holding you at this point."

"Alright."

"I'll invite her then."

A portal opens beside Addy and a woman steps out. "Hello. I'm Libby. It's nice to meet you."

"I'm River. Nice to meet you too."

"I've been reading up on your world. I've also been looking into the facility where you're being held. I think I have a pretty good sense for the security procedures and I have all the electronic codes. I also have all the biometric credentials though those are a little harder to spoof. It should be possible with dreamscape magic though. Your government has a class of agent who's allowed to go anywhere and that's one approach to getting out but I don't know if we want to attract their attention. I guess maybe Addy could write software to wipe their audit logs."

"Sounds like it'd be doable pretty soon. Though I'd also want to heal myself and fix my own brain some."

"I have their research notes and all your medical records, but they weren't planning to reverse things. We can ask Cray to look into things if you want."

"The big thing I'll need to undo is the chemical restraints."

"There'a few approaches to that. The most straightforward one is just learning to purge your body of specific chemicals, though that doesn't work for drugs that are naturally present in the body. Similarly you could flood your body with enzymes, that has some of the same issues but it doesn't require as much conscious attention. The third approach which is somewhat harder would be to learn to isolate the chemicals when they inject them into you. The fourth approach would be to ask Cray to do it for you, but I can understand not wanting someone else manipulating your body after what you've been through. The hardest approach but the most comprehensive would be to force your body to behave regardless of whether it should be chemically capable of that but most people can't impose that level of control over physical worlds."

"I'd rather do the last one."

"Alright, I don't think I can help with that I hope it works."

"I can help a little with that, but I don't think anyone but Emma actually pushed the magic that far. I think the first step is probably to assert full control over your mind so your brain can't influence it. The way to do that is probably pretty similar to what you did with the telepathy and we can practice that somewhat accurately."

She nods. "The telepathy thing wasn't hard."

"Things are a bit harder outside. You could practice something similar by having someone else try to assert the rules of reality on you and the area you're in."

"Okay."

"Do you want to try that now or talk more first?"

"Try it now."

Addy, reaches out to the library around them and pushes to make both River and the area around River more real. It feels a bit like a suction trying to pull away the changes she's made to her telepathy and her safeties and any other magic she's applied to herself, and simultaneously a pressure, like the whole world is heavier and more difficult to handle.

She pushes back.

Addy grimaces a bit. The suction weakens. After a little while longer the suction stops. The feeling of weight remains but it seems a bit more tolerable.

After a little while longer Addy speaks, "I think that's roughly what being in the physical world will be like. It probably won't be weaker but it varies a lot from world to world how strong the pushback is. Your world already has telepathy so it's probably a lot less picky about it than some. I can stop whenever you like."

"I think I've got the idea. Thanks."

The feeling of weight disappears. "Alright, Libby is there somewhere safe outside the facility?"

"There's a few underground resistance groups which might be willing to shelter her. The government also has less influence on bodies further from the center of the weird multi-star solar system the government operates in. You should really look up the maps at some point Addy, I think their solar system might be a precursor relic or something, it's unreasonably complicated and unreasonably stable for how complicated it is."

"I'll have to do that at some point."

"It is big..."

"It's not really urgent but, at least in the worlds Addy and I came from solar systems don't tend to have more than three or four stars."

"I think it's weird in our galactic neighborhood, too."

"It is, I checked."

"Who are the progenitors?"

"Sorry, it's just a generic term for people who came before. There's been bits of evidence for civilizations like that in a few worlds we've been connected to but we don't have any idea if they were all done by the same people, or in this case maybe it's just a weird coincidence."

"Setting up a system with this many stars seems like a weird pastime, but I guess I've seen weirder."

"If I could do that I think I would, but I'd probably do a lot of other things too."

"Maybe they ran out of other things to do. Or really needed a whole bunch of planets all near each other for some reason, or their cosmologists got into an argument and solved it with stellar-forming."

"With that sort of resources you can probably afford to do a lot of different things all at once."

"Yeah. It'd be fun."

"We can play around with stellar engineering at some point. I've dabbled in the past."

Heeeeee. "Maybe I can make an even more stupidly complicated system."

"Maybe, the hard thing is making it stable."

"It'll be a challenge, then."

"I bet you can manage."

"I bet I can."

"I think we probably picked right having Addy as your greeter the two of you seem to have a lot in common."

She laughs. "I think we do."

"It's nice."

"You're fun."

"Thank you. You're fun too."

"What else can I practice now?"

"The next thing in the series would probably be to try the same thing with the chemical restraints you mentioned in your system. If you wanted to go at the same goal in another direction you could work on making yourself move faster, lift more weight, or react faster than you would normally be able to."

"I think I'd rather try stuff I can more clearly visualize the results of first..."

"Do you want to try working on this here or would you rather another locale? I have a few playgrounds, a ropes course... and also a gym set up to measure things precisely."

"Ropes course sounds fun. Unless you have a really big adult sized playground."

"Of course I do."

"Then the playground!"

Addy and Libby exchange a smile. Then she teleports River and herself. They land on a platform built around a tree with limbs high above them. Rope bridges stretch off in four directions. There's also a fire pole and a climbing wall, each covering the ten meters to the ground below. The first of the bridges leads to a collection of platforms built in and around a grove of trees some of which are improbably thick. Branches and leaves are deliberately placed giving the area a fae feeling. The second bridge leads into a cliff face. Small windows are visible dotted above and below giving views into somewhat cramped tunnels and more generous cozy rooms. The third bridge leads to a massive wooden castle with towers, more rope bridges and platforms oriented at a variety of heights so you can climb either the inside or the outside. The fourth bridge leads into a massive array of ropes and and nets with platforms suspended here and there. You can climb directly from anywhere in the net to anywhere else.

She heads over to the cliff face.

Addy follows. At the end of the rope bridge there's a small sitting room with beanbag chairs and a thick carpet that climbs the walls with a fractal rainbow pattern. There's branching off from there there's one tunnel tall enough to walk upright through, another couple that you can crouch in and several more that require crawling, at least for an adult. The crouching and crawling tunnels all have a foam covering to make it more comfortable.

She explores one of the crouching tunnels.

The floor, walls and ceiling are all covered by a squishy material so it doesn't hurt if you accidentally bump your head, soft light comes through the ceiling. The tunnel is part of a three dimensional maze. There's a line with arrows pointing back to the entrance on the the floor. The initial pathway leads to another small room with more tunnels sloping up and down and in several directions, both towards the cliff-face and deeper into the mountain.

She keeps exploring, deeper into the mountain.

There's a lot to explore, if she keeps going downward she'll eventually find one of the pools of water with racks of masks next to it. There's underwater passages leading out from the pool.

Oooo.

Time for a swim, then!

The mask allows the user to breathe underwater, though if River wants she could probably manage without it. The underwater passages lead to a coral reef lit by bioluminescent coral and animals.

She tests out making herself able to breathe underwater, first, then see perfectly even with the water in her eyes -

The reef is beautiful.

Some of the fish are braver than others and rub up against her if she lets them. There are of course more passageways, some obvious and some hidden.

She lets them! This is delightful!

She explores the more hidden passageways.

This particular passage was concealed behind a bit of kelp. It leads to a small above water chamber with several portals in it. One portal leads a woven cocoon of a room probably something hidden in the net of ropes. Another leads to a wooden room with several funhouse mirrors, perhaps it's in the castle. The third leads to a treehouse that appears to literally be built inside a tree with branches growing into it to form furniture. The fourth and final portal leads to a room with a transparent balcony that protrudes from the cliff-face.

She heads into the transparent balcony, looking around.

There's an almost perfectly transparent substance that forms the floor and the railings so you can look in all directions. The cliff face is a red tinted rock and one segment looks pretty climbable. Back inside of the room with the portal there's also a few tunnels leading back into the depths of the mountain.

She spends a good while resting, just looking around, then starts climbing.

The climb starts off easy but gets steadily harder hand and foot holds getting further apart, towards the end she might need to jump from one hold to another. The full wall is about ten meters. If there are any safety measures they aren't obvious.

She wants to be able to jump that well, can imagine herself being practically super human as she climbs.

Well then she can do it, maybe not on her first try though. If she falls a small bubble surrounds her and deposits her gently at the bottom of the wall where she can begin again.

The bubble is fun.

She keeps trying until she gets it.

When she reaches the top she'll find a nice garden with some trees, several flowerbeds and a small pool of water. This one doesn't have any secret passages. The grass here is unusually soft and springy.

She looks around, then flops on the very soft grass, giggling.

Addy steps out from behind a tree, she definitely wasn't there a second ago. "Having fun?"

"Yeah!" She giggles.

"Yay! I've been working on this place off and on for decades now, it's nice when I get to share it with someone new."

"It's really nice! You did good work."

"Thank you."

"What now?"

"Well, you managed to enhance your muscles while climbing that wall, there are harder walls around if you want to challenge yourself in the same way. For more variety there's a somewhat unstable running track in the treetop area. I bet there's some way to challenge any other physical performance limits here too if you have something specific in mind."

"I'd like to try the running track."

"Alright, this way." Addy takes off running straight towards the edge of the cliff. When she reaches the edge an ethereal walkway appears beneath her feet, slowly shifting through a rainbow of colors. Addy is running pretty fast.

River takes off after her, trying to modify herself to run faster - though she's always been good at track, so her baseline's pretty good.

Addy always seems to manage a burst of speed when River is about to catch up. Eventually the ethereal path will merge seamlessly into a wooden bridge, the track here is a bit wobbly as compared to the walkway.

That makes it more fun.

She sees if she can't improve her balance.

There is as Addy said a track, the surface changes from time to time, up ahead there's a segment of what look like giant mushrooms with little gaps between them. Addy bounces higher than might be expected while bounding across them.

Maybe she can do similar by adjusting her leg muscles - and rapidly adjusting how much gravity affects her -

Trying to adjust gravity is much harder than the other things she's tried. Adjusting leg muscles should be pretty similar to what she's already done. When she reaches the mushrooms, she'll find that they are in fact magically bouncy.

Fun!

She keeps experimenting, not being particularly cautious about her own health, but does focus on the race and making herself faster while she's at it.

Addy continues leading the way. The next unusual bit of track has a section with giant lilypads that start to sink into a small pond if you stand on them too long.

Heeee.

She has a lot of fun jumping between them, sometimes taking pretty big risks to avoid standing on one over the time limit.

The worst that can happen is that she falls in. The pond isn't even very deep it goes up to her waist.

Still! She doesn't want to get wet.

Addy is giggling loudly as she runs. When River starts catching up the next time Addy starts adding in cartwheels and forward hand-springs. She's clearly showing off, she may also be cheating but then so is River so who cares.

She tries to enhance herself enough to jump over Addy's head.

She can probably do that but landing might be tricky and the path isn't always the widest. She might end up in a bubble again.

That's okay. She'll just have to keep practicing.

Eventually Addy stops putting on more bursts of speed at that point River can probably overtake her. At that point they're faster than even the best athletes though not by a huge margin.

"This is fun!" she calls out as she passes.

"It so is."

Laughter, and then she puts on a burst of speed - still, she doesn't try getting too ahead of Addy.

Addy wouldn't let her even if she did try. The next oddity on the track is a loop-de-loop, though for this one there's also a flat path next to it.

River's ready to challenge herself. And probably fall at least once doing so, but, hey.

You do have to be running pretty fast to make it work but not as fast as conventional physics would suggest. The pace that they're already going suffices.

Awesome!

River seems to be having a lot of fun, still.

There is a reason Addy brought her here instead of to a more conventional running track.

Seems to have been a good decision!

And they've now completed one loop of the track, no reason to stop after just one though.

River's up for a second loop - which she handles much more gracefully - but wants to stop after that.

"All done then?"

"Yeah! With this, at least."

"Sure, I'm not much for running endlessly either. Do you have anything in particular you'd like to do next or do you want me to come up with things?"

"I do want to learn things that'll be - helpful with breaking out."

"I think you've mostly got the hang of imposing your magic on your body, it will be different and probably harder when you're outside but I'm not sure how much help more practice inside will be. I'm sure Libby would be willing to go over what she's learned about the facility layout and security if you'd like. Sen could also help you learn to fight more effectively if that's something you want to practice."

"Layout and security, I think, and then fighting to get the edge off."

"Alright, would you like to meet Libby back in your library or would you prefer to see Libby's main library?"

"I'd like to see her main library, if she doesn't mind."

"We can definitely go to the main library, though generally there's at least a few people wandering about it's a public area for all that Libby made it. If you don't want to be around random people I can ask her to fork it temporarily, it won't take that long."

"...Yeah, I don't want to be around random people right now."

"I thought so." Addy looks to be concentrating for a moment. "Libby will send us a portal when it's ready."

"Okay. Thanks."

About a minute later a portal opens up in front of them. It leads into a massive lobby, there's a massive stained glass ceiling that paints the central area they arrived in with a variety of colors. There are sixteen different wings with ten stories which stretch of as far as the eye can see, all lined with shelving and the entrances to aisles. All the floors are serviced by a network of catwalks and stairs. A number of free floating moving platforms are also flitting to and fro. In a few places there are glassed fronted nooks and in others there are mirrors with about the same size and shape. On the lowest floor there are what look like futuristic computer consoles with holographic maps floating among them. The maps indicate that the library is series of concentric rings with the corridors spines joining the rings together.

Libby is waiting for them.