"Wow! That sounds so cool I don't think I've seen anything like that before."

"Okay, we can do that, then! Let me just clean up here a bit and we can go. It's easier to cross over at symbolic gates and there's one not far from here."

She starts putting away the tea stuff.

"Sounds good." She'll wait at least relatively patiently. With the time she has she'll look around and try to capture as much detail as she can. Not with a particular goal in mind or an expectation it's important but it's easy to be a bit excited about new worlds.

The cabin has a lot of little details that would demonstrate how it was built and how people use it, which the author does not want to figure out. The forest is temperate, mixed pine and oaks, with a number of small birds and furry critters and tiny insects around.

The ruined bunker is a bare concrete edifice with concrete stairs down. The place is a spartan set of rooms and hallways, completely empty except for old bloodstains and the odd drain, rusty rebar protrusion, or puddle. To magical senses, it might appear... Slightly ominous. But to mundane ones, it's just a cramped empty bunker.

She finishes cleaning up, and then it's just a brief little walk down the packed dirt path to a slightly faded red painted torii gate, and she holds out her hand and, once taken-

-They are somewhere else. The trees are greener here. The dirt of the ground feels more wholesome and healthy somehow. The animal sounds are different, but if anything seem more real than before. It's night here, and the moon is shining, where it was not before. And there is a very faint ambient disquiet sort of feeling, like shadows clinging to the woods off the path.

Wow!

Akira is even more interested in this new place. She was half expecting a more chaotic dreamscape sort of place but this is really cool and unique.

She speaks quietly just in case that feeling of disquiet is important, "Do we need to be careful or something or stay quiet?"

"Not on the main road! Maybe let me do the talking if we meet a real spirit, but they're fairly rare. The one to watch out for in this region is the Charioteer, who likes to careen down the spirit paths at maximum speed and doesn't care about anyone in the way getting hit. So if I tell you to get off the path, don't hesitate- But don't go too far either."

"Makes sense. Everything is kind of deeper here isn't it? It's... perfected... isn't the right word but everything has more weight and it's closer to the way people think about it rather than all the variations that happen."

She starts quick walking down the path.

"Yeah, that's right to the heart of it, really. The Spirit World is formed from the stories, hopes and dreams, the impressions and echoes left from the Material... And then it interacts with itself and twists and becomes a little bit different, of course, it only perfectly reflects the Material in places that haven't had a lot of history. There are places like that, though, we call them 'thin'. There's not enough history there to be realer-than-real, yet. The whole ocean is all pretty thin, for example, save for some coastlines and bays. A vast deep."

"Huh, so you don't have any sorts of people who live in the deep ocean then? No famous naval battles that shaped their vicinity?"

"Merfolk exist, though mostly around the shallow, warm waters of southern Noten I think. And I think the gods wiped most of that clean, or at least suppressed it? And the coasts and bays can be more lively. There are some nasty, nasty places if you go wandering. Echoes of desolation. Before that bunker back there was cleared out, looted, and continuously blessed for a few decades, there probably would have been monsters coming out to bite us here. And that's not out of the question still."