"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."

"Huh is this a cataclysm world then? Somewhere that was at peace or in a sort of golden age and then there was a big disaster that broke a lot of things?"

"I wouldn't call it a golden age, by all accounts the old empire was awful to everyone including itself. The cataclysm was the war that happened when they fell apart, reportedly, though it was also reportedly massively destructive."

"Hmm, I think that still mostly counts. So are the curses all traced back to that war or did they just get worse?"

"You know, I don't actually know. I wasn't around back then, the longest I remember back is about... Three hundred years? And it was about four thousand ago."

The nighttime oak forest twists, dreamlike, into a cliffy pine wood. They're going along a mountainside path with a stellar view of a large lake, now, a minute after they were going through a densely overgrown canopy.

Akira watches carefully but even watching closely she can't quite catch the transition as a logical thing, which she supposed makes sense. "Weird. I guess there's the dream logic. And makes sense about the history."

"I think it's really quite amazing! You can see things and do things in the Spirit World that just don't quite make sense in mundane material!"

"It seems that way. I've visited a few places with their own kind of logic like this but they usually force me into a weird body to work with that."

"A weird body? I suppose places that are sufficiently strange just - would not support bodies made of flesh and bone and blood, or ones made of dreams."

"Oh yeah, one time I was a metal horse who pretty much couldn't ever stop running and left a trail of rainbows behind me. And another time I was... a kind of machine that could only move in these really specific ways to make sure meat got cooked properly."

".....And here I thought Tamamo had done some pretty extreme things to our bodies to craft a particular experience." Megi shakes her head. "We're, uh, powered by sex. Not exclusively, but it's definitely the easiest and most fun way."

"Huh, I haven't really had sex before. It's been a thing once or twice but I haven't really explored those paths it's most commonly emphasized in nursery worlds and I don't spend much time in those."

"Is a nursery world a 'filled in' world, better for people to grow up in? Well, it can be very fun, but it's also emotionally and socially tense sometimes, probably best to not just... Jump right in, if you decide you're interested."

"Usually, but the actual meaning of nursery worlds are worlds that let people make new real people. Most worlds don't. Any spark holder can make fake people but real people are special and so nursery worlds are kinda rare; people have all sorts of opinions about what it's okay for a nursery world to be like. They tend not to care as much about other worlds."

"Oh. Yes, this is a nursery world. Most people aren't in a position to have strong opinions about what it should be like in a way to actually... Implement them. Sounds nice."

"Huh, that's a little weird. Maybe your world is more isolated than I thought or something else is happening that I don't understand. Do you think your world is bad?"