She finds herself among a battalion of warriors. There is a dragon above her, attacking a great city. It is not her city, but it is theirs. The city burns. She is breathing the smoke, and holding a shaking blade.

It is frightening. It is terrifying. She is terrified.

The thing Samora does when she's too scared to be clever is to cast Holy Smite on the scary thing. 

A blast of searing light envelops the dragon's face, and it roars with pained fury.

Did one of the mortals do this? It will breathe lots of fire at them, just in case.

Ow and also oh shit that hit a lot of friendlies. She channels.

(Author's note: in a situation like this, you are supposed to either run to the densest group of allies, or yell "Channel!" and wait for a three-count so anyone wounded and mobile can pack in, but Samora's dream brain doesn't remember Large-Group Tactics lecture.)

The people around her are healed! They let out a ragged cheer; tho' the dragon burned them sore, they rise again, as Londoners must do!

...there's a little boy at Samora's elbow. He's wearing a pair of tinted lenses that... aren't quite gold... in some difficult-to-define way.

"What d'you think you're doing here?" he wonders. His voice is somehow clearer than the cheering and the shouting and the crackling flames.

"Good question! I think I ate a Plane Shift! Where is this?" she yells over the background noise.

"This is a bad dream, and it's not yours. Come with me?" He reaches out a mildly grubby hand.

. . . Yeah okay.

He leads her through a doorway into a damp, packed-earth cellar, which shimmers, dreamily, into an underground burrow, then out into a steaming jungle, and through a mirror set into a tree...

eventually, they arrive at a tree laden heavy with fruit. The boy plucks some cherries. "Have some, they'll help clear your head."

This kid is definitely probably a fae and you shouldn't eat food from the fae but also her head is very much not clear right now. Is that an argument for eating the food, or against it? He doesn't read Evil. Is her aura still up? Yes it is. He seems more friend than foe, if she had to guess, and maybe she does. Does Detect Magic on the fruit turn anything up?

The fruit is no more or less magic than everything else in her field of view (except the kid's glasses, which are distinctly more magic).

While she's looking, the plums growing off the same tree are noticeably Evil. Not the cherries, though.

Huh. She should . . . oh she had a clever idea but it's gone now.

She's not going to accomplish anything in this state and it doesn't look like it's going to end on its own so anything that might get her out of it is worth doing. That's questionable logic but she doesn't have any non-questionable logic, that's the whole problem. She eats a cherry.

The cherry is a deep purple, so dark it's almost black. It bursts in her mouth like a firework, if fireworks were nectar. As it does, she can feel the haze over her thoughts thinning, her reason returning.

"There you go," the boy says. "Shouldn't take more than a few."

Extremely weird that that turned out to be a good idea but it sure seems to have been! She waits a minute, and when as far as she can tell it's not doing anything other than making her more lucid she eats another.

In this minute the boy manages a truly remarkable amount of fidgeting, including dancing from one foot to another, eating a cherry of his own, and twirling in a small and frustrated pirouette.

"You're sensible," he accuses.

"You've got me there." Another cherry and she thinks she's back to her usual self. "Thank you for getting me straightened out. What can I do for you?"

"Mostly I got you out of there 'cos I thought you'd be interesting. What'd you do to the dragon? Why're you dressed up like a knight? D'you have any sweets in your bag? That kind of a thing."

"I cast Holy Smite on it, which hurts Evil creatures. I'm dressed like this because I fight monsters for a living--I'm a priest of Iomedae and an adventurer. I'm afraid I don't have any sweets."

"You say a lot of words that don't seem to mean what you mean," he notes. "What do they call you? Or, if you're not a Londoner do you have something people call you?"

She's still worried that he's a fae and if she says her name it will result in problems. "When people don't call me my name they call me Select. I don't know what a Londoner is and am probably not one. I apologize if my language magic is running into trouble."

"Select isn't a whole one. It's like – I'm called the Winsome Guttersnipe, there's a Kind-Hearted Widow and a Traitor Empress and a Bishop of Southwark. You could be the Sensible Select, or something?"

That gets a laugh. "I suppose I might as well be. Why do people use these descriptions here instead of names?" Asking indirectly is probably more polite than asking someone if they're a fae straight up. 

"Mm... so, depends who you ask, like everything does. People on the street, they'd say it's the fashion. People who know a little more than that would say it's about keeping people seeing you the right way. Which isn't not fashion but it isn't just fashion, if you get my meaning. And those who really know... eh. I don't really know. But I think if you're clever you don't want to leave something as big as who you are to chance, and Christian names are chancy."

She chews on this claim for a moment. "And what you're called is more of who you are than the clothes you wear?"

"Names're important. People can make their clothes matter too, but names... names connect you to who you were, where you're from, what you've done. Names have roots."

The Winsome Guttersnipe shimmies up a nearby non-fruiting tree and hangs from it by one ankle. "Then again, so do trees, and they hardly matter at all."

"Huh. So where is this place? What plane are we on? Is there a way to get back to where that dragon was without getting ability-drained again?"

"We're in Parabola just at the moment. Close to the Mirrormarches, but still in the Waswood border. And I could put you back with the dragon, but I dunno why you'd want to go. Not your city, is it?"

"In the medium term I want to go home, but a dragon attacking a city is a big enough deal that I want to help. It doesn't matter whether it's my city. It's what Iomedaeans do--find the biggest problem they can solve and solve it."