And then she feels a jerk and a twist and gravity is suddenly pointing the other direction.

Jesus fucking christ that's so goddamn weird feeling.

Okay. Now she is exhaustedly climbing up, and she really hopes this is going to be done soon.

It's only a few more feet before the ghoul pulls her out of the hole. 

Owwwwwwwww why are shoulders and also hands and also the muscular system and also the entire concept of joints.

After that long underground she has to blink a lot before she can see much of anything.

She's entered what one might call a cavern, except that the roof is her eyes can barely make it out. One might even call it Cyclopean. The light in the cavern is gray, like twilight the moment before the dawn. The ground is scattered with bones-- human, animal, and miscellaneous. She sees a set of ribs three times as large as she is. The cave walls glow with sickly green bioluminescent fungus. In the distance, a fire flickers, and the ghoul heads towards it.

As she walks, something sticky catches her feet. 

Cool.

Or, gross, but also, cool. Low light photos are hard but she's going to try; she gets distracted for a couple of moments by examining the ribs but is, in general, following the ghoul (whose name she still doesn't know and she's not sure whether she should ask, he didn't give a name when she gave hers, maybe ghouls don't do names?) towards the fire.

At the campfire, there's a white human man in his mid-thirties. He's dressed like Indiana Jones, except for the sword slung across his back. He pokes the fire with a stick.

"Pickman! What did you bring home? Human or dreamborn?"

"Human, I'm pretty sure, unless she's very lost."

"Hello, I'm Randolph Carter, and that disgusting and very rude pile of flesh over there is over there is Richard Pickman."

"You know," Pickman said, "from my perspective you're disgusting. All the fur."

"Has anyone ever screamed in horror to see me?"

"They screamed in horror when they saw your cooking."

"Hello, I'm Inaaya Khadpo, I am to the best of my knowledge human, I find it hard to believe that whatever you cook is worse than embalming fluid, and he was not rude to me he was actually very nice. Also, cool sword."

"Using cool swords is a good idea because in the Dreamlands weapons mostly work based on how cool they are."

"...is there an objective ranking of weapon coolness, how do you tell whether a sword is cooler than a bow and arrow, is a sword that glows cooler than a lightsaber or does it not work like that, speaking of cool things what kind of animal left that ribcage do you know I didn't get a chance to look at it properly, is this an obnoxious number of questions should I stop—"

"--are you a dreamer?"

"I don't know what that is. I have psychic powers but I haven't noticed them having anything to do with dreaming?"

"At night, do you have elaborate dreams, probably with continuity from night to night, of-- adventures, wars, beautiful cities--"

"Mining, farming, pastoralism," Pickman added, "not everyone is as violent as you."

"No, my dreams are all things like 'I'm teaching a sibling I don't actually have how to ride a bike' or 'I have to get to Oakland before robot vampires take over the world but all the public transit maps got scrambled and the connections don't make any sense' or 'someone on the internet is having extremely stupid drama which I am for some reason involved in.' To name a few recent examples. Why?"

"Well, welcome to the Dreamlands, home of the unconscious and the archetypal. Also ghouls. --That animal's a gug, I'd recommend avoiding them because they like eating humans."

"Neat. —I want to ask approximately a million questions and I don't know where to start."

"I'm going to recommend not learning things because it tends to rend your sanity and render you incapable of participating in normal life and then your boyfriend is a ghoul."

"Gee. Thanks."

....so they weren't going to tell her anything either.

"Oh."