“Thing inside your chest that goes beat beat beat? Most people’s tether to sapience. Necessary source of vampiric yum yums. Red. Heart shaped.”

"How could a heart not be heart shaped - I don't think we know whether ours are tied to sapience per se, but we'd probably die if ours stopped working.  Possibly you should explain vampires."

“It’s been a day.

If you take the heart of an ordinary person, they’re a zombie. Completely obedient, vaguely dead, moderately useful to a certain kind of person. If you take the heart of a witch, they become a vampire instead, since they still have a soul; vampires are mostly like witches, but they need to connect with other people’s hearts to stay sane, and they mostly do that by drinking blood and having sex. Vampires can also have mates; they imprint on the heart of a witch, fall in love, and thereafter have primary command over that witch’s magic as well as their own. They also have fangs.”

"It sounds kind of like your farmers' hearts are somewhat like our witches' souls, then, given - what I've learned here.  It's hard to know what our hearts do but I don't think it's that.  Also, people - or Lyssdians, rather; apparently your kind does - don't have blood; I'm assuming now that that was the red liquid you leaked when I, er, stabbed you?  And for context, a vampire, as the word is normally used, is a kind of beast that attempts to extract and collect people's lyss.  They have fangs, too, which isn't especially unusual for beasts, but they use them more than their claws, which is, a bit."

“The gibberish gorse sure did decide on some translation conventions. Is ‘farmer’ more than just a profession, here, non-witches do a wide variety of things.”

"It's the word for all non-witches, yes.  They're also much stronger and harder to injure and tend to be built differently: frequently taller and almost always broader than I am.  They do things other than farming, but still generally physical activities - it makes sense you'd have them doing more, since they're almost all of your population?  We're about half and half.  - Well, I say 'about', it's usually pretty exact."

“Witches and non-witches of my kind don’t have any baseline physical differences.”

"Hm," they acknowledge.

"Well, I've had a bit of time to digest your chocolate straw berry; we should probably discuss when you want to make a break for the portal.  I'd expect the longer we wait for it, the higher the chance they notice I'm missing and the more likely it is we encounter trouble on the way there, but I'm not terribly eager to get going if you can think of anything else we should cover."

(- should he offer to make this person a quick suicide trigger? He probably can’t do that without strongly implying that he has a suicide trigger and strongly implying which conditions might set it off. He doesn’t especially want to imply either of those things. Damn.)

“I don’t think there’s anything I want to grow before we head out, given time constraints- ” and the fact that you’re potentially compromised, he does not say “-and it sounds like ‘go somewhere other than the portal’ isn’t tenable. We can head out now. I’ll follow your lead.”

"Some basic strategy first - you listed individual powers you already had, earlier, and I think evasion was one of them; what does that mean specifically and is it applicable here."

“People who attempt to injure me generally fail. I’m not sure I feel comfortable specifying in more detail.”

"Understandable.  Anything else that might be useful?  - Basically, we need to get around to the other side of the building and cross an open field without getting captured, which'll be much easier with stealth than with open combat.  I can do personal shields that decrease noticeability and those are pretty good but won't help in the event that we do get noticed, and they're somewhat draining.  Also, I should mention that the portal leads to a building that's itself safe, but there are beasts in the woods outside it, albeit ones much weaker and - less coordinated, than those here."

“I am in general very good at stabbing things but I’m not sure how I stack up here. If I ever need to suddenly and uncontrollably fling myself into the air with gravity I can. I have a cherry bomb left for the day. They explode. Nothing else comes to mind.”

"All right.  Meeting you has been a strict improvement over not having done that.  I don't expect the reverse to be true."

And with that, they hand-dance each of them a tall oblong bubble.  Lane's looks shimmery to Jamie but presumably this wouldn't be true if he hadn't already been aware of them; his own is almost entirely transparent from the inside.

"Lead with your fingertips to go through the bubble instead of bouncing off it," they say, and extend their arm, and walk outside.

Jamie follows in the manner recommended.

And so the two of them can make their way around the perimeter.

Beasts come into view before the portal does; Lane slows down a bit and is obviously intentionally controlling their breathing but keeps on.  The shields seem to be doing their job.

Eventually, they round a corner and a stone-and-copper building of sorts, with something emitting a fair bit of purple light from the inside, comes into view.

There's a paved path going from it to the castle that they're approaching from the side, encompassing the entirety of the smaller building's open doorway.  When Lane steps on it, it makes a piercing shing! and a bright flash of light, and all the beasts, the closest of which is about thirty yards away, snap their heads towards the both of them.

Jamie has learned a valuable lesson about running before his native guide indicates he strictly ought to! He remains still. For now. He’s very ready to stab things.

His native guide is kind of busy panicking.  The beasts don't rush them right away - they howl, haunting and loud, even to Jamie's relatively non-augmented ears, and Lane rises, and -

- perhaps it would be healthiest to stop thinking of them as his native guide for the moment.

That just figures, doesn’t it. 

Jamie is extraordinarily agile, as weightless as he wants to be, and something about the air around him seems to make people and projectiles inclined to slide away just shy of him rather than directly connecting. He can probably make it to the portal building - looking less like a person and more like a vaguely humanoid gust of wind - without having to do much stabbing.

He is in fact also very good at stabbing, if that comes up.

He might have to do a little stabbing, yeah, or at least slashing.

Lane bleeds purple glowy stuff, apparently; it floats in ribbons behind them as they chase Jamie toward the portal.

Going through the portal from his dorm to the castle felt relatively seamless, apart from the shift in gravity.  This one - doesn't; Jamie's left disoriented and unable to process input from his senses for several moments before his brain catches up.  By the time it does, Lane's rushed through the portal, come to a stumbling stop, acquired an expression best described as 'horrified', slumped against a wall, and started crying into their knees.

(They're bleeding, still, but it's orange now, with a sharp gradient between that and where it was coming out purple.)

God he fucking hates this fucking day.

He watches, carrot knife at the ready.

Lane doesn't seem to be having a super great time of it either, honestly.  In fact, if uninterrupted, they're just going to sit here crying for several minutes.

He tries discretely growing a self tying vine, in a corner, so he can restrain them if he needs to. It doesn’t grow. This isn’t very surprising; Alexander was never going to refrain from tying up his magic for very long.

He keeps his knife readied in their direction, insofar as he can, and peers very carefully outside the narrow where-they-are for a look at the broader where-they-are.

They're in a forest; it's night.

Before he can take in much more detail than that, a beast, somewhat but not much smaller than the ones on the moon, springs from outside his field of vision to uncomfortably close to him.  Snarling, it bounces off the open doorway, twice, with a flash of light where it hits, and falls back a few paces, watching Jamie with a constant low growl.

Shadows move behind it, and it might not be the only thing growling.