A small, delicate girl with a small, delicate face walks in the door, glancing uncertainly around the room. She doesn't have any bags with her.

"Ah, hello," she says when she finally sees Ezodai. A small smile curves her lips. "Exciting, isn't it?"

"You could put it that way. As long as it's not too much like the excitement back home, I won't complain."

"Why? What's the excitement back home?"

"Every time you try to solve one problem you generate two more."

"...troubling," she acknowledges. "But how?"

"Mostly it's that problems come too fast or are too complicated and you don't have time to come up with good solutions. This is a me problem, to be clear, as of a little less than a year ago; not something random people have to deal with. I mean, it has escalated to the point where random people have to deal with my problems, but at least they don't have this chicanery about their own."

"Fate, luck, or neither?"

"Shitty ex-boyfriend."

"Ill-luck in love!" She smiles again, wry and sympathetic. "My condolences."

"Your condolences are appreciated. So why are you here? I came to get away from my escalating problems."

"Ill-luck in love, I suppose you could say." She brushes a lock of hair out of her face, her smile going soft and distant. "The one I love has many enemies, and I must grasp every scrap of power I can find, if we are to be safe together."

"Aww! That's sweet. Good luck with that. I wouldn't call it ill-luck in love, though, exactly, more like love in ill-luck."

She laughs. "Thank you! I suppose you're right."

"What's your world like? I won't be offended if you redact details or lie about your personal traits to make me underestimate you but it would be annoying if you lied about your world."

"How do you describe a world?" she muses, wandering across the room to sit down on the unclaimed bed. "I'll tell you what I like best about mine: it's old and grand and beautiful, with relics of lost ages everywhere you look. Full of history and secrets. I can wander a ruined city for hours, thinking about what it would have looked like when the stones were new." She glances up from tracing her fingertip across the swirling patterns of her blue-and-white blanket and smiles. "And you?"

"I guess I assumed that much was standard. Mine has a whole bunch of species! Sentient ones I mean. I think even places that have only one kind of person have a bunch of species of plants and animals and stuff. There's humans and elves and dragons and Finnfolk and dryads and harpies."

"What sort are you? I'm a human. A nice ordinary thing to be. The spiderfolk are too new to be well established and the mer and serpentines have fled and faded, but humans are everywhere under the sun."

"I'm an elf. What does 'fled and faded' mean?"

"It isn't their Age anymore. The light's too strong and the air too thin. They go where they're comfortable, under stone and water."

"So they're, like, around, but not really accessible?"

"They're far enough away that I don't know where they are or how to find them."

"Makes sense. So where'd the spiderfolk come from?"

"The turning of the Age, from the Sun's time to the Web's."

"That doesn't sound like a place."

She cocks her head quizzically. "It isn't. Do people come from places, in your world? How? Do you dig them up like old bones?"