"I guess I would like a few days better, then."

"Alright. I don't believe there are any gates open for that long, but I can teleport us, and there should be gates open that long from each other."

"Okay."

He's going to be poring over this almanac thing for the next little while, if she had any questions or wants to go back to her reading.

She goes back to her reading. She's very fond of this library.

He's proud of it.

Eventually, he says, "There's a good window in a bit more than a week."

"Okay."

That settled, he pulls out a different book and sits down in one of the squashy, comfortable chairs to read.

Books are so good.

They definitely are! Unlike people, they don't require complicated social interaction or attempt to murder your loved ones.

They... do have those features, yes.

Yeah, there's a reason he lives by himself in the middle of nowhere. And why he has to be careful where in Fairyland he shows his face.

But there are plenty of places in Fairyland where he can show his face, and it is to a gate to one of these that he brings Riya a bit more than a week later.

The gate is really interesting.

"You might want to stare at that from the other side, so that we'll be where we want to be when it closes," Kanimir comments, stepping through.

Riya steps through also.

...Fairyland is really interesting.

Isn't it just? Nearly everything in view is magical, in one way or another.

She might just. Stand here. And look at all the things.

That's fine. Kanimir brought books, and they're not in a hurry.

There are so many things! What do they all do?

Well, the plants: grow in ways more convenient for...someone...(the magic in the plants is very decidedly connected to a person not present) but in a way determined to maintain a "wild grasslands and forest" aesthetic. The land is likewise connected to a (probably the same) person, but in an almost opposite manner; it strengthens and supports them. Those ungulates over there are unnaturally long-lived and have healing magic, mostly but not entirely concentrated in their horns.

The ungulates are pretty and their magic is interesting. She pokes at its reflection in her selfspace.

These are basically horses! They had magic done to them a long, long time ago, many generations ago in fact, and now they are extremely magic themselves. The healing and the longevity are separate things, although if she tries to copy the former she may be hampered by the lack of a horn to put it in.

Not if she doesn't copy it exactly...

She fiddles with a unicorn's reflection, makes a mess of it, starts over with a different unicorn, isolates something she's willing to take, realizes she could do even better than that, waits for a third unicorn to wander into her range, and finally pulls together what she wants: combining the touch-healing ability with the lingering remnants of the lifespan-lengthening effect to get the property of healing-and-extending-lifespan at a touch. It doesn't come through nearly as powerfully as the original, though. The first unicorn wanders back into range, refreshing its reflection, and she tries again to see if she can do it better.

By this point she has spent quite an inordinate amount of time gazing distantly at unicorns.

Well, that sort of thing is literally what they're there for.

It's not long before the unicorns' caretaker wanders into range.

Oh, a person! That's distracting. She is distracted. She examines the person.