"What she said."

She hesitates at the threshold. Holds one hand up to it as if feeling for something. Then she steps through suddenly with a half-held breath. Then she flushes slightly.

"-Ah, sorry. The only other... Gates? Horizons? Shortcuts from place to place I know give off a really creepy feeling. Are you two... Sisters or something?"

"She's me, but with a different background. I was a soldier on a shadow-haunted Earth and a seasoned adventurer from Sigil. She's a member of the Society of Sensation and the archivist who keeps our collective memory in order. The same person, two different lives. These crystals -" she shows the quartz at her neck "- let us record and share experiences, and the OTC is able to give us extra bodies to live in. For a substantial sum." 

"Huh. Well, nice to meet you again. What's the OTC... Like?" (Small frown.)

"It's not exactly human, but still kind of alive. It dedicates most of its profits to developing more universes from scratch so that sentient beings will have more room to live in. Executives," Eva waves, "and scouts like me have strong latitude for how to develop the company in new universes, and currently I'm leaning towards the Tacketies though I haven't been to nearly enough places to have an informed opinion on what other factions and ideals might be out there. It prefers to be very hands-off in its dealings; it likes working with small entrepeneurs; it absolutely never supports slavery, and actively devotes resources to wiping it out. That includes slavery-in-all-but-name like indentured servitude. The company would say it's in favour of the independent blossoming of all sentient life; in practice it's willing to meddle in order to prevent slavery or seize valuable enough assets."

"-So the company is a person. Alright. There's a wind that I'm pretty sure is a person, it's not that strange. Well, it's easy to say nice things, right? I don't know if you've had much to do with either the Tacketies or the Windward Company. Can you replace cheap rugs and furniture and machine parts and stuff made by debt slaves. You should do that. If the Workworlds aren't making any money maybe the institution will collapse."

Eva snaps her fingers, and now there is a nice persian rug, two chairs and a table, and an electric blender atop the table.

"Material goods are easy. Magical ones are harder. Thorn here blew a month's budget on synthesizing a pitcher of Chorister honey for personal use. Speaking of which, can I offer you two some food?"

"She really seemed to like it the other day! It was cute. Food, sure, but I'm kind of stuck on - if you can just... Make food and furniture like that," she snaps her fingers, "It kind of changes everything? I don't quite know what to think yet."

"It's a little less instant than it looks - everything here is "stock", so I could just teleport it out of a warehousing subnode. We can make entirely new items almost as quickly though, through the use of advanced partly-magical manufacturing processes - and even for things that are highly difficult to synthesize, we can speed the process through the use of something like Hours." 

"Number six combos for both of us, I think; Lenora, if you don't like hot turkey sandwiches and fries feel free to toss this back and get something else, the food is basically free and on us anyway."

"Those both sound weird to me but we'll see if I like 'em! So you can make horizons and teleport things. Gonna make locomotives redundant at this rate."

"Our magic is somewhat unreliable in other worlds - the physics work here to make these things possible. I have a more limited selection of abilities, bound directly to myself - I can teleport myself to places I've been with a lengthy ritual, I can repair things magically, I can lift and move very heavy things with magic, and I can fly without a locomotive, but I need a locomotive to actually explore or else I'll go skymad like anyone else. The horizon is tethered to the mechanical device you saw me put down; we can't open them accurately without a beacon like that. I stumbled out of this world directly into Traitor's Wood and had to improvise myself to New Winchester."

Eva conjures hot turkey sandwiches with gravy and french fries for the both of them. 

"I'm glad you got out okay. I guess the runes are more than just really cool looking then? If you're not from- This universe, does that mean you dont have to deal with Judgements mucking things up or the anarchy of darkness?"

She sits down and curiously bites a fry. "Hey, this is good!"

"Yes, the runes bind the spells to my body so I can use them anywhere. Judgments are unique to the High Wilderness so far as I've heard, and I don't know what the anarchy of darkness is." 

She has a fry herself. "Fast food from the Earth I lived on. They were in the twenty-first century and things like Empyrean Exotics were commonplace."

"Technology is always advancing, huh? Light is law, souls enforce law, most really weird stuff like Hours uses light in some way, so sometimes, more the more distant from light and longer it's dark, the absence of light is the absence of law - including those of physics or causality, eventually. The Liberation of Night are an anarchist group that prefers it that way. Freedom, they call it. Horror, more like."

Munch, munch.

"Say, do I get paid for helping you figure out the High Wilderness?" She wonders teasingly.

"We can probably set you up as a native guide in the system. You'd be paid in Oifilei Trade Credits, OTC, in exchange for the information you'd be providing to Thorn in keeping her from blundering into an early First Death." 

"Because the crystals preserve our memories and experiences, we can be "reincarnated" into new bodies even if we're killed, just so long as the crystal is retrieved." 

"I kind of want in, you know? But I hardly know anything about OTC yet and the last time I worked for a large company actually they were horrible. I just told Thorn the whole thing. Anyway. So, I should preserve the crystal and try to get you back here if something happens. I wonder if... A you... Would end up as a shade in the Blue Kingdom..."

"I suspect I wouldn't take that lightly if I did end up there. We're headstrong, us Evas."

"As for wanting in, you're free to take your time to decide. I'm sure Thorn will go out of her way to give you more chances."

Munch, munch.

She's feeling strangely awkward now.

Companionable munching. Giving Lenora her space to process. 

"What's your name?" She asks the other Thorn eventually. "Eva? What kinds of things can I buy with Sovereigns, or are they too primitive to be worth the time?"

"Yes, Eva. Material goods are too easy to counterfeit. We trade in universals. Time, Energy, Sacrifice (which is usually Pain), Information and Lifespan. Thorn, how much do you owe her?"