She appears to be in an alley between two buildings made of smooth stone, squat and simple. There are second story windows, but they're covered in wooden shutters, not glass. One end opens up to what looks like a street and the other is a dead end. She can hear someone yelling, distantly. A small sign next to one of the alley's doors, carved into the stone, says 'Mutlaw and Gran's Office Rentals'.

It's really hot. Unpleasantly so. The worst of summer heat that has you sweat through clothes in an hour or less.

Also, there's an entirely new sense happening to her. She can feel her own body in a very odd way, thousands or millions of things winking into and out of existence inside her. Also, she can feel similar ones up to about an inch from her skin. She, unaccountably, knows that she can do magic with them.

It's absurdly hot and she is dressed for a much cooler environment so she's going to immediately take off her jacket. She'll also internally complain both about wearing long sleeves and, in case she's dreaming, to her subconscious self for picking this weather. 

She's quickly going to get distracted from looking around by that new sense. Especially when she notices the figurative 'this is for doing magic' label that accompanies it. (This has some points for the dream theory, because of that kind of 'just knowing things' but she also doesn't usually get very complex magic in those.) Anyway, she can't just learn that and not decide to test it! How much does she know about it and can she do something with it right now, pretty please? Or get a closer feel of the many many things?

There are VERY many things. It's really hard to focus on all of them at the same time. If she investigates her hand closely there is more and more detail, but awareness of the rest fades. There seem to only be a few categories though? Half a dozen or so. Names spring to mind: Water, air, fire, earth, lightning, light, dark.

The weird intuition knows the steps of magic: Take some of the tiny things, claim them, move them around, breathe deeply and channel power, do a thing that forms a rule defining an area of space, applied to some collection of tiny things, and push the breathed power into the rule. For example, the fire things can be used to add or remove heat.

Oh. It's a bad idea to remove too many from your own body. There's a sense of dread attached to that idea. You want to claim ones floating around instead.

Yeah, Verity is not going to pretend that she knows better than the magic intuition. One doesn't ignore feelings of dread when trying out new magic, no matter how curious. Maybe she can ask other people later (assuming there are some, she hasn't seen any yet but she also hasn't been looking for them, and she is in an alley, those usually come with towns attached) but there are better things to learn than how to accidentally hurt oneself.

So, since she isn't touching the wisps in her body, she'll try to claim some from the air near her. Then, if she manages that much, she'll see if the intuition also knows how to explain the rules so she doesn't make something up and get it wrong. Not that experimenting with dream magic by seeing what blows up unexpectedly and what doesn't sounds uninteresting, it's just that she can't actually be sure it is a dream and, if it isn't one, she'd rather not get hurt. 

Claiming some of the wisps around her is decently easy, especially if she uses her breath. Air she's breathed out is slightly more hers than air elsewhere, at least for a few moments.

Now she has claimed some of the wisps around her! They're mostly airwisps, and the ones she just claimed are held in place relative to her instead of moving around all over the place. The next step is to take those airwisps she's just claimed and glomp them together like - this - It's a mental primitive action that is really difficult to describe, but feels obvious. That's called a binding, a group of wisps held together and told to do something. Then you do this - To tell it to do something specific, like 'blow a cool breeze'. Once it's actively doing things, it needs energy- Imbuement. If it runs out, it'll stop existing. You add imbuement by focusing hard on gathering energy through your breath, and then willing it into the binding.

Verity will carefully follow the steps as indicated by her new intuition. She’ll gather the wisps together and join them. Then she’ll order them to… make a breeze? Be a breeze? She’ll go with the one that feels right and maybe learn in the process whether the wisps are those parts of reality or modify those parts of reality. Finally, she’ll gather energy (is it physical energy, as if she were running? Or mental one? Something new maybe?) and add it onto the gathering. And, most importantly, she’ll watch it follow the instructions she’s given it. 

Imbuement is just... Energy. Neither or both physical and mental, perhaps.

She now has a breeze attached to her face. Or well, a space a few inches in front of her face that moves when she does. The airwisps that the binding is made up of are fixed in place relative to her, very distinct from all the other airwisps in the environment. It's making any air that enters that region move, which creates a pleasant breeze. She could change the direction, strength/force, and also make it affect the temperature.

A man walks out of one of the unlabeled doors, scowling at a piece of paper. He's wearing strange clothes- A thin green tunic, poofy white pants, and sandals that look like they're not made of plastic. He has a leather messenger bag, is wearing glasses, and looks middle-aged, perhaps. 

He pauses, frowns at her, glances over her Earth clothes (which are obviously expensive, regardless of the strange style), and then asks, "Are you looking for someone, ma'am...?"

As long as it doesn’t take a lot of energy, that already seems pretty useful! With the current heat, this breeze feels great and she hasn’t even modified its temperature yet.

Of course, when the man addresses her she forgets to keep giving the wisps energy and the breeze stops. She doesn’t immediately reply as she looks at his clothes. Medieval fantasy? Oh, right, the windows didn’t have glass either.

“I, uhm,” she’s never good at talking and she was caught by surprise… at least the man is talking in something she can understand, “I’m not quite sure where I am, I must have got lost.”

The binding lasts for a few moments more after she stops imbuing it; Then it runs out of the tiny amount of imbuement she had given it so far and dissolves. The airwisps that used to be part of it go everywhere.

"Ah. Yes, the old streets can get confusing- If you head left past the alley and then the second right after that you'll come to the core road. And the coast road is right at the end of the core road, naturally. Hopefully you'll be able to get your bearings from there?"

The part of her that isn’t busy paying attention to directions (she’s really trying to remember them but they’re very slippery even if they’re simple) is glad that the wisps are just released and they don’t die. Not that she has any evidence of them being alive to begin with.

“They really are,” She replies, nodding. “And I hope so too. Thank you.”

She won’t actually get her bearings from there since she’s never been here before but a main road should be helpful either way. So, she’ll awkwardly smile at the man and wave as she walks away, following his instructions.

"Good day," he says distractedly, looking at his papers again and starting to walk after her.

Past the alley on the left is a narrow street, maybe three yards wide; Most of the buildings here are stone, two or three stories tall, but some are wooden or have wooden components. Things are painted brightly. There's plants here and there. There's a lot of foot traffic, and a few signs advertising different things- Food places, stores, offices, houses, a 'dragon shelter', a 'merchant house'. People shout to advertise their wares- Food, booze, tailoring, tools, glass, magic.

There are wisplights floating attached to tall poles- Her magic intuition says they're made with the same kind of magic as she has. She sees someone with dozens of lights floating nearby and a tall staff walking along and attaching the lights to the poles by extending the staff high above and working through it. 

There's a place full of billboards with posted papers to look through, with people shuffling in and out. Looks like job offers and rental listings, mostly. A woman sits at a desk nearby and charges people a small little glass bead(?) to post things.

There's a cart moving along slowly through the foot traffic, loaded with crates and barrels and being pulled by a weird and kind of vicious looking horse-sized animal, that seems to be... Undead? It's not breathing and it moves stiffly and robotically and it looks sort of dead.

It would be pretty easy to get lost again and miss the second right turn.

Now that she’s not doing magic herself, Verity is free to look around and see the magic others are doing. Including the walking dead sort-of-horse. She’s curious about it (especially since it doesn’t fit with the magic she has, which means that there are probably multiple kinds of it) but also a bit creeped out, so she’ll look away not long after and stare at the lights instead. Those she could try to imitate later!

Also, if it would now be pretty easy for the average person to get lost, she’s pretty much guaranteed to. Especially since she keeps looking around at, well, everything. It isn’t even that she missed the turn, she entirely forgets she should be taking it.

Instead, she’s now looking at the shops (a dragon shelter? It’d be so cool to see dragons!) and then at the billboards (the glass beads are probably some sort of local coin or currency?)… and then she realises she was meant to take a turn but can no longer remember which it was.

The dragon shelter looks more like a bunker or fallout shelter than a place for dragons to live. Heavy stone, stairs going down. People aren't going in and out but the area is kept clear and the signs for it are very obvious.

There are four kinds of beads being passed around as currency. She knows that she could swallow one of the bright cloudy ones and get a lot of extra oomph for imbuement by absorbing it.

Furniture! Clothes! Bar! Glass! Paper! Books! Pawn shop! Noodles place! Grocery store! A clinic run by a 'deadspeaker'! Salt and spices and medicine! Glass jars and tableware! Someone making and selling ice (she could also do this) for cold fruit drinks! Accounting and money changing! Bakery!

(Oops- shelter from dragons, not for dragons. Admittedly, she’d still kind of like to see one, just… maybe from farther away.)

Double use currency! Knowing about the cloudy beads makes her wonder if the other types are meant for users of other kinds of magic. She’s obviously internally comparing this all to books, games and movies, so she’s associating these beads to mana, regardless of whether that’s actually a thing here (the magic she did earlier didn’t draw from a new set of reserves like she’d expect mana to feel but she’ll use the word anyway).

Ohhh, a ‘deadspeaker’ sounds like the kind of person that could make dead animals walk around. Her type of magic probably has a name too! Does she know it like she’s known other stuff about it so far? 

She's a Wisperer. The things she can manipulate are wisps, and the things she can make with them to do magic are called bindings.

‘Wisperer’. She’ll quietly repeat the word to herself. She likes how it feels. (Most likely because it means she can do magic, but that’s a perfectly good reason!)

And then she’ll pause and realise that… this is really a lot of detail for a dream and she’s never had such an internally-consistent one before. Maybe- she should be thinking of things as if she’s here for real.

In those circumstances magic is still fascinating, of course, but figuring out how to take care of her basic needs takes priority. Her stomach isn’t quite rumbling yet, fortunately, but she’ll soon be hungry.

She would presumably need a job. Luckily, she's seen several ways for Wisperers to make money by doing magic already- And the billboard place with job and housing rentals mostly is still back there somewhere.

People have been looking at her a fair bit; Earth clothes are distinct from the local styles, even if there is some good variety there. Also, some people have anime hair- Blue, bright red, or green, or the like.

Then she’ll walk closer to the billboards and see both if there are any job offerings she might be able to apply for despite her lack of basic knowledge on this world’s workings, and what the housing prices are mostly like.

She’s also feeling a bit nervous due to all the people looking at her. New clothes will have to wait until she has money for them though.

(Also, she’d absolutely complain -jokingly- about not having got an anime hair colour if she wasn’t busy with everything else.)

There's a billboard specific to Wispering jobs, small and sort of in the corner. Some job listings include: Lamp-lighter for the Demesne (which seems to be the official government; There's a seal). 'Imbuing Bound Tools' in a carpentry shop- It pays very little but is advertised as no carpentry experience required. Ice-making at an ice house near the docks. Stoker at a smithy, to provide heat. Water jet cutter. Evaporator on a salt-gathering boat. Excavation and stone-shaping work, construction experience preferred.

There's also lots of requests for Wisperers to join smaller settlements, or people planning to make settlements. This one promises good pay. This one promises low rent. This one is looking for a wizard who wants to be a Dungeon Binder to lead them, though they must pass an interview first. This one promises that they're on a river and have an easy commute back to Covehold. This one is a group of former militia advertising hunting experience. This one promises that they have a skilled Deadspeaker doctor already. This one promises that they have good farmers. This one promises that they have a sturdy underground stone-reinforced dragon shelter.

All of these places have addresses for where to inquire further listed, and one of the wooden boards has a little map that you may look at- Showing a fairly sprawling little town stretched across two thirds of a semicircular bay. The 'you are here' has her in the part marked 'Old Town', right near 'Dungeon'.

Prices tend to be denominated in 'bead-tani', which seems to be some sort of general agreement on bead worth (I.E. this kind of bead is worth 5 bead-tani and that one is worth 12 and so on), but it's wildly inconsistent. Some places promise, for example, two double small wispbeads per hour, or one small midlarge talkbead per week. One person has posted an advert for trying to buy unmarked wispbeads, which are not legal tender, at under the face value of marked ones.

Verity is honestly a bit overwhelmed by all the options and new words and information. After reading through most adverts and getting them all mixed up, she’ll eventually pick a semi-random one. Just whichever one’s address seems close by, easy to find, and she’s not expected to have previous experience. This is also when she remembers that she was carrying her phone in her pocket and will take it out. She doesn’t have much hopes of it working but, if it does, she’ll take a picture of the map and some of the adverts.

Among the things she needs to learn about she list to herself: bead-tanis (more curiosity than necessity but she’d like to know what they’re made of), Dungeon Binders (she has no clue how those two concepts relate to each other), Deadspeakers (also not immediately relevant). There’s plenty more but she’ll remember those as they come up.

 The beginnings of a plan now formed (if they can even be called that, more like intentions, really), she’ll try to follow the map to her previously chosen address so she can ask more about whichever job offer she’s ended up picking.

The carpentry shop hiring any Whisperers to power their bound tools is down on Nail Street, near Emborin & Sons Merchant House. The directions included on the flyer included a picture of their logo on the sign- A hammer and a carrot.

Nail Street is directly off the Coast Road next to a big tree that is protected by law, and the Harbor Road is easy to find- Just go to the coast, so she can find the place with about thirty minutes of walking.

(She does notice that once away from the place she dropped in that a lot of the construction here, especially closer to the water, is... Cheaper and cruder than the lovely stone buildings in Old Town. More wood, sometimes strong and sometimes gappy, worn, or leaning. Sometimes built on nice stone foundations and sometimes not. The people, too, are more tense and stressed, and somewhat more raggedy and thin. It feels like a bad neighborhood in some ways. There's still smiles and laughter and friendly waves, but- Just a bit of tension.)

Anyway, here's Veggie Cutters Carpentry, the place that posted the job flyer. The door is open and sounds of hammering and sawing pour out.

Although Verity is mainly focused on getting to Nail Street and not getting lost again, she still notices the bad neighbourhood-ness and tenses in response. She also walks a bit faster. Somehow, despite all the possible distractions, she manages to arrive to the carpentry shop. (After some more walking than she would have liked.)

Once there, she can freeze by the open door and worry about how she can manage to feel confident enough to try to get hired for a job that's based on an ability she didn't even have until less than two hours ago. And she comes to the conclusion that stress won't solve her other problems (somewhere to sleep, stuff to eat and so on), so she's going to have to pretend she's not anxious and knows what she's doing!

Internal conversation done with, she takes a deep breath and steps into the shop. Hopefully who she has to approach will be obvious in some way (uniforms, addressing her first... anything works as long as she doesn't have to make a completely blind guess).

There's no front room, the door of the place goes right into the middle of a big workshop space, just slightly separated from the 'front' by a low counter. Half a dozen men and women are working- Mostly on furniture, it looks like. There's sawdust everywhere. It's somehow even hotter inside- But a loud metallic jingling comes with her opening the door.

"Just a second!" One muscular black-haired woman shouts, not turning from her inspection of a wooden beam. "Mhu, finish sanding that and then go see if Brisa needs help okay?"

Then the woman stretches a bit and turns and approaches the counter, putting on a service smile. "Hello there, welcome to Veggie Cutters carpentry workshop. What are you here for today?"

She has quite a few complaints about the heat and is very much not happy that it’s even worse inside! It also doesn’t help that she’s wearing jeans. (When she gets new clothes, she’ll make sure they’re less warm.)

She’s also feeling shy and embarrassed despite having already talked to herself about it being unhelpful, so she’s visibly uncomfortable when she clears her throat and replies. “I’m, uh, I’m here about the job opening-?” Good job sounding confident, Verity. 

"Job opening...?"

Slightly confused face. Then a blink.

"Oh, you're a Wisperer? Yes, right, we're looking for someone to imbue our bound tool! It's a wonderful piece of kit, but quite heavy on the imbuement... The price you pay for quality, I suppose. It's just that beads are getting a bit too precious to justify using it for most work. But it might actually be cheaper to hire you to just imbue it directly. Depending on your rate. I'm Gaara, nice to meet you, wizard...?"

Verity is going to nod along. Yep, she sure understood everything in those sentences and has all the necessary knowledge! Why would anyone doubt that? (She has at least understood the general gist of it and hopefully the details will make themselves clear.)

"Verity," she completes, smiling nervously, "nice to meet you too, Gaara."

"Indeed, indeed! Well, do you want to go see it right now? Sooner started sooner finished and all."

Another nod, "sure, let's see it now." 

She heads towards a tarp by the side of the room.

"It's a combination bench saw and mortising tool. Good for drilling and grooves too. Have you ever done carpentry? Oh, here, help me get the tarp off? Careful, now."

"No, I'm new to it," and to magic too, although she won't admit that part out loud when she's still trying to pretend she's a local. 

She grabs two of the tarp's corners and helps Gaara carefully lift it off the tool when asked to help.

"Oh, I'm really excited to use the bound tool again but I don't want to ramble on and on forever about it if you don't know what I'm talking about. I'm sure you'll pick things up."

The tarp comes off, with the dusting of sawdust that everything in here has acquired, and is bundled up to the side. It's the size of a whole table, a wooden frame, but there's lots of metal, and a few pieces of glass, and a large boxy piece that would be where motors and electrical equipment hide on a modern power tool. There is a shiny sawblade (after Gaara lifts off the protective cover from it) and an almost robot arm-y looking thing with a complicated and slightly vicious looking pointy end. The wooden surfaces have rulers on them, and there are multiple vices to hold things in place. There is a long row of switches and dials. It all looks surprisingly modern and industrial.

"Right! The last wizard we hired complained it was hard to imbue sufficiently, especially when the multifunction arm is on, so yes, I am aware of that. The bead receptacle is over here, so if you just touch it carefully and try to imbue, we'll see if this will work."

"You can tell me about it anyway, it might help me pick things up faster," she shrugs, "I'll let you know if I get tired of hearing about it."

Verity coughs a little bit at the cloud of sawdust that rises but begins examining the machine as soon as the dust has mostly settled. She hasn't seen much woodworking equipment back in her home world but this tool looks... normal. Normal by her standards for it, which are pretty different from what she's expecting from this world. Also, this machine looks intimidating (industrial tools usually do) and she can't quite believe that she'll be powering it. 

"Understood," Verity replies with a nod. She places her hand where she's been told to and, after waiting for a brief moment in case she's actually touching the wrong place, she'll take a slow breath in and begin imbuing the bound tool.

It's the same mental motion she did earlier to charge her little breeze, except this time the copper plate sucks it all up immediately, pulled straight out of her grasp in a slightly jarring way, and then seems hungry for more. Significantly more.

(There's a slight noise not entirely unlike a fridge or A/C kicking on. Some of the dials light up.)

Well, it does look like a powerful tool, of course it needs more energy than the small breeze. Verity will, uh, try her best to keep up with its demand! She doesn't know yet how much energy she can imbue or for how much time she can keep doing but this might be a good test for both of those.

(It's the most familiar thing so far, this magic machine that looks like one powered by electricity and technology, and it's still the weirdest because it almost breaks this world's 'theme'. Which a part of her, still struggling to believe this might all be really happening, insists is very much like something that could happen in a dream.)

With focus and deep breaths she can channel much more imbuement- The worst draw only lasts for ten, fifteen seconds or so, then it seems to taper down significantly. Still a fair bit, but closer to a slow jog or fast walk than a sprint.

"Good, good! This beautiful beast was my dad's, you know, we've got the rotary saw, we've got the mitering blade, the press, and the groove cutter here... It was SUCH a huge pain getting it over safely, you know? But I could never sell it."

She goes through the instrument panel. The circular blade turns on a bit, and then stops. The robot arm thing's pointy bits turn and extend and retract in a few ways. The big box on the side opens up, revealing some kind of hydraulic press arrangement. Each tool activation ticks up the imbuement draw somewhat. It feels like there's a small internal battery, to smooth out sudden starts and stops.

"Cutting thick beams down to size is one of the most time-consuming parts of our work- More than anything else, 'cause you need two people on the hand saw, but this baby will do it in thirty seconds! Colors, I'm getting too excited here. You can stop now!"

Verity looks at the different tools with curiosity, although not with her full attention since she needs to focus on the imbuement. For that same reason, she isn’t listening very closely to Gaara but she’s still interested in her explanation.

When she’s told she can stop, Verity tries to gradually (but not too slowly) decrease how much energy she’s imbuing so she doesn’t stop the tool too suddenly. For future cases, she should ask if it’s best to do it like this or faster, although she’s a bit embarrassed about needing to ask and she doesn’t know if this is something that’s considered common knowledge.

The quiet whirring of the huge bound tool sloooowly winds down. Gaara is grinning, and claps her hands. "Right! How was it?"

"New to me! Surprisingly energy-hungry at first but it wasn't too hard to adapt to, even though I kept almost getting distracted by being curious about all the tools," she admits, chuckling. 

"Oh, good. And it is certainly an expensive and useful piece of kit, isn't it? I look forward to working with you if you can bear it. Uh, not to put too much a rush on it, but I was wondering about your rate and availability for imbuing the tool?

“Do you want us to start now? I don’t have any other plans that might get in the way,” she does need to figure out where she’ll sleep but that requires more thinking than imbuement does, and she’s kind of dreading it.

"It's getting on towards evening. We can start now, I suppose, if I rearrange some other work... But I want to get the rate agreed on first. So there's no confusion or hard feelings, right? I'll offer you ten bead-tani an hour, paid in Taniar standard smallmid talkbeads. So, one of those per hour unless the value of talkbeads changes noticeably."

"Sure, that sounds good," she nods. Honestly, she's still too new to this currency and is just hoping she's got the correct idea of it and isn't being tricked. (Yes, she looked at all the advertisements earlier but that doesn't guarantee anything, they might all have had embarrassingly low wages on offer!) She has had no reason to distrust Gaara so far. 

Gaara frowns, looking more concerned than annoyed. "Well, if you say so... Uh, do you happen to be in trouble of some sort? Tell me to mind my own business if you want, but it's just... I try to be neighborly even though Covehold is getting harsher, you know?"