Somewhere else is a busy city street surrounded by skyscrapers. Pedestrians hurry back and forth over solar panels set into the pavement. An electric tram whooshes past on a monorail. 

A passer-by who happened to notice the girl appearing out of nowhere says something incomprehensible.

...

The thing she says back is not in the local language. Or any local language.

The woman tries one or two other languages, roping in a couple of other passers-by, before concluding that this is a problem out of her pay grade. 

After attempting to pantomime that Holly should wait here, she pushes back her blazer sleeve and starts tapping at the screen of a device attached to her forearm. After a few seconds, it speaks to her in the first language she tried, and she speaks back. After a few such exchanges, she taps at the screen some more and then steps back against a wall to wait out of the way of other passers-by. 

After a few minutes the newcomer sits on the sidewalk and tilts her head curiously, looking at the device and all the people around.

Shortly, a pair of winged people arrive overhead. They drop out of the sky, braking smoothly just above people's heads in some way that seems to have nothing to do with their wings, then drift the rest of the way to the ground. 

One of them folds his white wings behind him and steps forward. 

Hi! he says telepathically, echoing it out loud in the local language. We heard someone needed a translator?

- how are you doing that?

Uh, magic? he says distractedly as the woman in the business suit explains what she knows of the situation.

Was it not obvious from the wings?

The wings we thought you could have gotten off a bird, the this thing where would it even come from?

—okay, I think we're missing a step or three here, how about we back up. Hi, I'm Liro, what's your name? And how did you end up in the middle of Corali without speaking any of the five most common languages in this country, because I think the answer to that might be important. 

I'm Crystal and she's Holly and we were eaten by a demon only this a very odd place to be inside of one.

Oh, there's two of you! I see it now, sorry, I was trying not to look that closely. Uh, I'm not sure what you mean when you say 'demon', can you send me what it looked like?

The telepathy is pretty intuitive to interact with.

Crystal didn't actually see it, so Holly does that.

...well, that looks like nothing I've ever seen before. So normally my first guess would be 'mage trying on a weird shape', but this doesn't feel like a normal situation. Uhhh, have you seen one of those before today, and do they normally eat people? 

We've never seen that kind but as far as I know all demons eat people. Our brother might know what kind it is but he's not here. What's a mage?

...person with magic, like me and the other winged person over there? Which should have translated as whatever your local word for us is. Are you from somewhere that doesn't have mages—and does have demons, which aren't a thing anywhere on this planet as far as I know—

What's a planet?

Big spinny round thing we're all standing on...? I promise my translation is normally way better than this, it should just match concepts—

He sends an image of the planet from space, a memory of a photo rather than something he's seen personally. A blue-green-brown sphere wreathed with clouds, floating in a dark starry void. 

We're.... not from a that.

He lets out a surprised laugh.

Wow, are you from a long way away, then. Uh, wanna go somewhere quieter and I can explain how things work here? And then we can work on—finding you a way home, I guess, if that's what you want. 

Yes please. She gets up.

Liro leads the way to a nearby café, his dark-winged companion—whom he introduces as his sister and teammate, Radha—tagging along.

Uh, if you're not from a planet I can't guarantee that we have any of the same foods, but do you want anything?

Yes, please, we've been on troported food for ages.

I can definitely get you something that is not troported food! On account of I don't think that's a thing we have here. 

He joins the queue to get food; Radha them finds a table. 

Can I loop Radha in so you can talk to her directly? I warn you now, she has questions. 

Yes, all right.

Hi.

Unlike Liro, Radha doesn't echo what she's saying out loud. 

If you're not from a planet, what are you from?

...I don't really know what other kinds of things you expect people to be from. It's not round? Honestly this doesn't look round either but maybe it's just big. Ours really isn't round, it's flat and goes on forever.

Huh! That's strange. And—yes, planets are really big. Ours is, um...nearly eight thousand miles in diameter, I think. Approximately. You can see the curvature if you go out on a boat in the middle of the ocean, or if you're flying, but not from on land. 

:We've never been on an ocean and can't fly but I think it has to be really flat because of how suns move.

How do your suns move—suns, plural? Ours works like so—

Simplified mental model of planets spinning around a sun. 

Oh, that's neat! We have lots of suns and they go by overhead in straight lines. Mental image of a very sunny day: six suns in various colors scattered across the sky. A low blue one, a high red one, a big white one, a little yellow one, a fast-moving purple one, a ponderously slow orange one. Sometimes no suns come for a while but there's always more, that's why we think it goes on forever - people used to think there was an edge that made suns and then ate them when they got to the other side, but we've been exploring much farther now and are pretty sure that isn't happening.

So—is 'where do they come from' the wrong type of question—do you know what they're made of? If they're big balls of plasma, like ours, I wouldn't expect them to act like that, but obviously there's different physics involved somehow...

I don't know, we can't fly.

Fair enough, I suppose. Do—

Radha's next question is interrupted by Liro coming back with food.

I wasn't sure what you'd like, so I brought you a few choices. We'll eat whatever you don't want, so don't worry about waste. 

Holly and Crystal can have their pick of fruit juice, water, or coffee. Also on the tray is a selection of pastry confections, an orange, and a peach. 

It transpires that they do not like coffee. Everything else is amazing and they are hungry.

Liro dumps a slightly excessive amount of sugar and milk into the coffee and drinks it with apparent enjoyment, with Radha making faces of performative disgust. 

Has Radha been answering any of your questions or just asking them herself? 

Omnomnomnom. Mostly asking them. I'm not really sure what we need to know, here!

Okay, well, you hadn't heard of mages, so we should probably explain those. Sometimes, in this world, people between the ages of about 9 and 20—that should translate to your years or however else you count age—get magic. We call those people mages. There aren't very many of us relative to the rest of the world, but there are more every year.

What does the magic do?

Depends on the person! Everyone gets the ability to transform into their magical self, which can look however you want—we both went with 'winged human' and made a bunch of smaller changes to how we look, but some people end up looking as weird as your demon thing, or weirder. 

And then on top of that every mage gets powers on a single theme—like, my theme is telepathy, and Radha's is time manipulation which she's somehow managed to extend into telekinesis. 

I started with the power to make things stop in midair, Radha explains. And then it grew in two different directions. 

There've been studies done on why people get the powers they do, and it correlates pretty strongly with the powers they would have wanted if you'd asked them in advance.

Huh, neat. We have troportation, everybody can do it but some people are better at it. Holly's good.

I can get a general idea from the word, but what's troportation?

:Moving traits between things. Like drowsing mice. She turns to display her backpack, which turns out to have a compartment that is a mouse cage at the bottom. With live mice.

Radha leans forward to peek at the mice. 

So you...make the mice sleepy? Instead of yourself, I assume. Or is it taking their wakefulness, rather than giving them your sleepiness? 

It's swapping our sleepiness for their wakefulness!

Huh! Do you always have to swap things like that, could you take something without giving anything back—is there any limit on what you can swap, that seems really powerful—

You have to touch both things. Some stuff you can just take.

...I wonder if you could take someone's magic. 

Please don't test that on yourself.

I have no idea! You can move souls around though, I was going learn to do that.

Souls? Liro jumps on the new topic immediately, possibly to distract Radha from experiments. 

Is this related to why you're two people in one body? 

We were born with three actually but Book moved out. Most people are born with one soul to one body and only switch to two in one when they find someone they want to move in with.

Huh! Why'd he move out—unless that's too personal a question? 

'Cause he's a boy.

—oh, right, that makes sense. Different magic, different solutions. Personally I just spend as much time transformed as I can, but I guess if I was sharing my body with a girl or two then they'd be uncomfortable. 

Yeah. So we went to mixers and he found a boy who he liked the look of who also liked the look of himself and wasn't hoping to leave his elbows behind in a cohabitation or whatever so now he lives with Lightning.

Is that working out for them? Sharing a body isn't a thing people tend to do here, except a few people who're born that way like you were, so I've not met anyone who does it. 

We actually do it weirdly! Normal people - and Book now - only have one of them conscious at a time.

Your way seems more useful! I think here it varies, different people have different brain configurations. 

Does everyone in your world cohabitate? Radha asks. 

Not little kids - well, not little kids in rich cities where they can sleep under a dreamward. I think in poor places they have to move little kids into each other right away.

...I have too many questions. She shakes herself.

What's a dreamward and what does it have to do with cohabitation? 

A dreamward keeps this one kind of demon out? Most demons you can keep out with, like, walls, but there's a kind that goes through walls, and it only eats sleeping people. It doesn't go through a dreamward. So if you have a dreamward, you have all the kids sleep under it, till they're old enough to pick their own cohabitors, so they aren't stuck with random people forever. But if you don't have one, well, babies sleep a lot, you can't really just have all your babies out in the open falling asleep all the time.

It sounds like your world has...kind of a lot of problems with demons. Be neat if we could send some mages over to help you deal with them, when we figure out how to send you back.

That'd be neat. We were with Book and Lightning and got split up when the demon started chasing us.

That sounds rough. We can hope they're okay—and if the demon got them, they'll just have been moved somewhere else like you were, probably?

I guess? I'm pretty sure most demons just literally eat you! But I guess klaonso are weird so maybe this is another weird kind. I wish I'd known how to kill it, most of them have weaknesses but I don't have them all memorized. Probably if she were telekinetic like Radha she could have at least trapped it under something long enough to regroup with Book, having magic besides just troporting would be cool -

And suddenly Holly is aware that she does have other magic, as of right now!

It feels like she doesn't have very much of it—it comes in amounts—and most of it is locked away where she can't use it right now, but there's a sense that she can change both of those things if she wants to. 

Oh whoa a thing happened?!

What sort of thing? —I'm not seeing anything you don't send, that's not how my telepathy works, but you can show me the memory if you want.

Holly attempts this.

Oh, you got our kind of magic! That's awesome! I wonder what your powers are. 

Oh cool! How do I tell?

Mostly people have to try doing magic and see what happens, Radha says, but you need to transform first. We should take you back to our base and you can experiment! 

Okay! I can turn back later for Crystal, right? We're both okay with being like so or I woulda found somebody to swap noses with ages ago but if I can do whatever...

Yeah, you can always turn back to your original shape. You're gonna have to—staying in magiform uses up energy, and you run out a lot at first. I'm trying to get to a point where I can stay like this all the time but I haven't managed it yet. 

Okay! Wow, if I don't have to worry about being able to undo everything later or whether she'll like it I can do all kinds of crazy stuff, can't I? Can I be a tiger? A tiger with wings. A tiger with wings that's blue. Oh or a GIANT BEE. I don't know if I'd actually like being a giant bee but can I try it?

Liro cracks up.

Yeah! Just maybe not in the café, we'll fly you over to our team's base where there's more room and you won't get everyone staring while you experiment. 

If Holly and Crystal are done eating they can leave right now, in fact. 

They are done eating! Holly bounces out after the winged people. I could be like an opposite demon! There's a kind that would be pretty if it weren't slimy and black.

Liro is still laughing as Radha holds out a hand to Holly-and-Crystal.

You okay with me flying you? We can take the tram instead, it's just a little slower. 

I guess I'm game if you do this all the time and haven't turned anybody into a splatter!

I fly non-mages about on a regular basis and have not turned anybody into a splatter! My power is very very good at stopping things falling, so even if I slip for a moment I can catch you. 

Okay! Is it hard to learn to fly?

With wings, they sort of come with the instincts built in? With Radha's power, it's no effort at all because she's doing all the work, Liro jokes. 

Ready? 

Ready!

And then they can all three go whoosh up into the sky, high enough to go over the tops of the skyscrapers. 

Liro was right, it doesn't take any effort at all to be carried along by Radha's power. She and Liro are using their wings to do their own flying, though.

"Wooooooo!"

I know! Isn't it fun! 

But far too quickly they are whooshing back down again to land on the roof of one of the skyscrapers. 

Holly puts down the backpack and spins in a circle. Okay, how do I be stuff?

Liro bounces on his toes, infected by Holly's enthusiasm. 

Should be pretty intuitive! There's only one thing your magic can do right now, right? When you're not transformed, the only thing you can do is transform. Push on that, and imagine what you want to look like. 

GIANT BEE GIANT BEE GIANT BEE

And now she is a giant bee! (The magic helpfully fills in details she forgot to think about, so she is a bee that works and can fly.)

...Liro doubles over with laughter again. 

GIANT BEEEEEEEE takes off and buzzes around! It's giant for a bee but not for a person, about three feet long. And fuzzy.

Don't go too far away, Radha warns. If you run out of charge and drop out of the sky I need to be close enough to catch you. 

In the back of Holly's mind, there's a synaesthetic sense of how much 'charge' she has left, like an hourglass running down. The metaphorical sand is pouring pretty fast! It might only last ten minutes or so. 

Well that's limiting and if she doesn't get that long she will try all her other ideas instead of flying the whole time! She lands and tries BLUE TIGER WITH WINGS. The wings are also blue. They have feathers. She flaps and takes a turn around the building and lands again and she's a golden demon, snakescaled and dozen-legged and gracile, and she skitters around and decides that's too many legs. She turns into a fox, a white fox, but that makes Crystal sad even though Crystal only knows about it in the abstract, so she tries being a hummingbird instead. Can I turn into plants?

You can! It takes a little more charge to maintain, but it can be worth it if it's something you really want. 

The magic's sense of how long it will last fluctuates with each change of shape, although never all that far in either direction.

Radha and Liro seem content sitting on the roof to watch. Liro is playing with patterns of gold feathers on his white wings. 

Holly is going to be a holly bush just for kicks! She completely forgets to think about how having roots will work on the roof of this building!

The roots just sort of sit on top of the roof in a tangle. There's a slightly uncomfortable dry feeling from having them exposed to air. 

Also, as promised, the sand is running faster. 

Well being a holly bush is completely underwhelming but she had to try it at least once. Now she is going to be a seagull. She is pretty into being a seagull and stays that way for several consecutive minutes.

You should find out what your power is before you run out of charge, Liro says. Just try doing magic to the air, or something—maybe in a direction away from us just in case. 

...okay! Seagull attempts magic to the air over there.

A ray of light shoots in that direction! It makes a pew sound! 

Whoa! What was that?

Liro has another attack of giggles. 

Looks like some kind of ray attack—this is why I told you to point it away from us—come over here and I'll throw something for you to shoot? 

She lands and resumes the winged tiger shape again.

Liro appears a red ball in his hand. 

It'll vanish if I let go of it for too long, so you'll have to shoot it quick—three, two, one—

He throws the ball in the air. 

Pew!

A bolt of light hits the ball, and it thuds back into Liro's hand half a second later. There's a neat little hole right through it. 

...nice! 

Neat!!!!

And then Holly runs out of charge and is dropped abruptly back into her human shape. 

Radha taps the screen of her wrist device. 

Eleven minutes, seventeen seconds. That's on the low end of average for your first time, but not by too much given your power use. 

When does it come back? she asks, shifting position from how she landed and brushing herself off a bit.

You recharge slowly over time, Liro explains. Most people get up to full charge over...about a day, I think, on average? I'm a bit slower, Radha's faster. It depends on what you spend your time doing, but the same things don't work for different people. 

There's a correlation between how much someone enjoys an activity and how much charge it gives them per minute, but it's not perfect, Radha adds. 

How's that work when I'm asleep?

Sleep seems to generate about the same amount of charge for everyone; we use it as a baseline. Eight hours' sleep will take you to around a quarter of your maximum. 

I don't usually sleep that long all in a row, me and Crystal fade in and out depending on what's up.

That shouldn't make a difference; when you're asleep you'll recharge at sleeping speed, and when you're awake you'll recharge based on what you're doing, just like any other mage. I suppose it might work differently for you because of cohabiting, but I'll be slightly surprised if it does. We'll have to wait and see! 

But like we don't go totally unconscious like normal cohabitors? I always know what she's doing.

Maybe it'll work like sleep because you're not doing anything, or maybe it'll work like being awake because you're still reacting to what's happening. It shouldn't make too much of a difference—I assume you and Crystal don't often do things the other one would really hate, or one of you would've moved out like your brother by now. 

Wanna come downstairs and we can finish explaining how it all works? 

Yeah!

So they head downstairs into an open-plan penthouse suite. In the centre are a few soft couches arranged in front of a large TV screen. Liro flops onto one of them, which looks to have been specially designed for people with wings judging from the low back. 

Radha heads for the kitchen area over to one side.

Is this your house? It's cool you have a house.

It's our base of operations! We share it with the rest of our team—one of them has rich parents; the building technically belongs to her dad. He's letting us use it rent-free as a 'public service'. 

Oh, that makes sense. She bops around peering at things for a bit and then flops down on the couch.

So. Basics of magic and how to get better at it. 

You can transform pretty much any time you have any charge at all—and into just about anything you can think of—but your charge will last longer, and you'll be able to do more magic, the more your form reflects your personality and your...ideal self, pretty much. 

Ideal self?

The idea is to find the shape that feels...the most like you? Some people think of it as the shape they want to be, some think of it as the way they always looked inside...

It'll take some experimenting. I'm not there yet and I've had magic for years! Radha thinks she's pretty close, with hers, but she might have a breakthrough tomorrow and realise she's always secretly wanted peacock feathers for hair, or something. Although I think she's tried that one in particular. 

Wow. I don't really know how to think about that! I know what sounds fun to try, but not what I'm, like, inherently supposed to look like.

Most people don't! All you can really do is try things and see how they feel. Radha was pretty firm on what she didn't want—she knows she wants to be mostly human-shaped, having hands is too useful to give up—but the other details took a while to fall into place, for both of us. Can you believe it took me three months to think of trying a boy shape? 

Yeah, it took Book a while to realize what was the matter too.

He nods.

So it might take you a while to find the shape that works best for you. And in the meantime, you can keep playing around with different ones until you find something you like. 

Sounds good!

Are you still hungry? Radha asks Holly-and-Crystal. And do you eat meat? 

Why wouldn't we eat meat?

Some people don't like eating something that animals were killed to make, Liro says.

Oh—does troporting change things there? You mentioned it can do food, so do you even have to kill animals to get meat? 

It can do food but it can't do it well. Anyway I could eat more.

Good; I'm making us something more filling than pastries and fruit. Flying is hard work. 

Radha throws a few more ingredients into the pan and keeps stirring. 

I'm not sure what to explain next, Liro admits. 

Do you have any questions? 

Eventually we're going to need more mice, is there a way to get those around here?

...probably? Does it have to be mice in particular, what do you need them for—

So our body won't fall asleep.

One of us can take you to a pet store; if they don't have mice there'll be other small rodents. You use mice because they're easy to carry around, right? 

Yes, and not expensive to feed.

Do the ones in your backpack need feeding soon? What do they eat? 

They have some food left, at the moment it's troported peanut, but we were using them pretty hard.

Liro, can you come take over the cooking, I need to make a list—

Radha hands over the cooking to her brother, pulls out a notebook, and starts writing things down, narrating as she goes.

Mice. Food for mice. Food for you, somewhere for you to sleep...do you need clothes or do you have enough in your pack?

We have another pair of pants but that's all. Also normally we don't keep mice in cages that small, that's just for traveling.

Change of clothes for Holly and Crystal. Bigger cage for the mice, bedding, probably the people at the pet store will know what we should get them...

We should find a way to communicate that doesn't rely on magic, for when I run out of charge, Liro adds. Translating doesn't take much power for me but I've been using it just about constantly. 

I can try to learn your language but it will probably take me a while.