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."

"S'not the real city, either. ...people aren't dying. They just wake up in a sweat when it burns 'em. Not fun, but not the biggest problem around."

"Oh, excellent! I've seen people wounded in life by things that happened in dreams; if this isn't one then I needn't worry about it. Is there a way to get back to where I was before I started dreaming? The Isle of Kortos on the planet Golarion in the Material."

"...never heard of it. Don't mean there isn't a way, you can get lots of places through Parabola, but I'll have to do some askin' around. Might take a while."

"I'd appreciate it. Are we still in Parabola or is this somewhere else?"

"Still in Parabola," the Guttersnipe says, patting a nearby mirrorframe. "I'll drop you somewhere more hospitable while I work, since you wouldn't know cats from snakes out here. Prolly London, since the tigers don't take to grown-up human visitors."

"Thanks! I can speak with anything that speaks a language but if you put me somewhere with humans I'm less likely to fall afoul of a misunderstanding."

"Misunderstandings with tigers go pretty bad. Oh –"

He fishes a silver ring out of one pocket, set with a tiny mirror. "Wear that? Or keep it close, at least. It'll let me find you when I've found where you're from."

"How does that work? I can't see any magic on it."

"Course it isn't. I just know the mirror, and I know my job."

"Ah, you can find familiar mirrors? Clever. Does it need to be somewhere with light or can I stick it in my bag of holding for safekeeping?"

"Doesn't need to be light. What's a bag of holding?"

"A bag with more insides than outsides! Take a look." She opens her belt pouch wide enough for the Winsome Guttersnipe to stick his head in. It has more insides than outsides and contains a lot of miscellaneous objects.

He takes the opportunity to stick his head inside, obviously. Then he emerges, shaking his head dizzily.

"Something tricky going on there, but I think I can work with it. It does at least follow you 'round, even if it's not the same place."

"If the bag is annoying I can wear it, it's just more likely to get battered that way. Shall we start off for London?"

"Yeah."

He takes her hand, and then walks in some direction which is – not, quite, any of the directions she knows. And pulls her with him.

It feels interestingly different from the Plane Shifts she's used to. Smoother. She walks/allows herself to be pulled thataway.

They step out of a mirror in the master bedroom in an abandoned manor house. It was once sumptuously upholstered; all of that is moth-food now, and the moths spider-food. It's dark outside, but the lights of a gaslit city flicker and flare less than a mile away.

"You can probably tell which way to go," the Guttersnipe says, looking at Samora to the exclusion of anything else in the room. "I'll get in touch once I've found your place, alright?"

"Thank you very much! Don't hesitate to ask me if you need anything healed, fought, or diplomatically negotiated with!"

"I'll keep you in mind."

And he steps back through the mirror, and then out the side of the frame, and he's gone.

Right then, quick sweep of the house for anything interesting and then out into the city!

Of interest in the house: little, apart from a couple of dusty black-and-white pictures of a boy who looks like if the Winsome Guttersnipe, a few years younger, was somehow inveigled into a sailor suit and induced to stand still for a portrait. Also, an infestation of saucer-sized spiders.

The city, once she reaches it, is strongly reminiscent of the burning city she dreamed of. Identical, really, bar all the burning and destruction, and the dreamlike stretchiness of the architecture. It's still rather sooty, but chimney-soot stinks much less of sulfur. There are beggars on the streets, but orphans are under-represented.

People are staring at her, a bit. And her sword.

She smiles a friendly smile back at them! If people seem really bothered by the sword she could put it sheath and all in the bag of holding, but she'd rather not, and it wouldn't actually make her much less dangerous, just less dangerous-looking. 

She wanders around looking for a temple or a tavern, those being the best places to go to get oriented.

Here's a temple, high-roofed and clean with a golden symbol over the door of a man hanging from a cross! Across the street is a tavern with a free-swinging sign depicting a suckling boar!

Hmm. That's a kind of concerning holy symbol. How are people in the area reacting to the temple? Are they stopping by to chat with the priest, or passing it hurriedly on the opposite side of the street, or something in between?

The people mostly ignore it, but some enter or leave, with only a few looking particularly shifty, unsavory, or self-conscious.

Probably a Good or Neutral god with a perfectly logical explanation for the holy symbol she just hasn't thought of yet, then. She'll stick her head in and see if there's anyone who looks like they wouldn't mind answering a foreigner's questions.

There's a bald man in black robes with a white collar, sitting near the door and reading a book. He's got a golden symbol hanging over his chest which isn't identical to the one over the door (no man on it), but is similar (still distinctly cross-shaped). When Samora enters, he looks up and frowns. "Do you need help, miss?"

He has a fairly strong Evil aura.

She's never encountered an Evil cleric in a city instead of a dungeon and relatedly never encountered one who didn't immediately attack her*. She is very briefly wrongfooted by this.

"Nope never mind goodbye." 

What's in the tavern?

(*Except that brand-new Calistrian, but that was a planned meeting under a flag of truce, not a surprise.)

His frown deepens as she goes, but he doesn't try to stop her, because that would be an absolutely bizarre thing for a priest to do.

The tavern contains a mixture of honest workmen, threadbare artists, and twopenny cutthroats. The laborers drink cheap beer and sing bawdy songs; the artists drink cheaper wine and sing sentimental songs; the criminals drink slightly less cheap liquor and don't, as a rule, sing anything.

If they take weird foreign copper she'll buy a beer, largely as a social prop, and either way she'll strike up a conversation with one of the more sober workmen. She's new in town and wants to hear the news, see.

The bartender will, actually, take a weird foreign copper piece. The low-level economies of London are by no means dominated by fiat currency.

The workman is sufficiently amused by this that he'll humor her in turn! "Well, there's this nightmare of a dragon going 'round," he says. "The taxes on love stories are worse than ever, t'hear the Bohemians tell it. And, speaking of taxes, I'll tell you summat really interesting: a mate of mine in Spite, he said there was a diamond, somewhere 'round the city, the size of a bloody cow. Probably honey-mazed, t'tell the truth, but wouldn't it be something!"

"Hah, no way. Whoever had it would have cut it up and sold it. Or made themselves king of the world. Unless magic is different here than where I'm from. But it sure would be something."

"The Masters don't like people like us gettin' our grubby hands on diamonds, but I've never heard it's 'cause of magic. Seems like it'd lead to even more smuggling than there already is." Thoughtful swig of beer. "And the zailors say there's a whole mountain that's all diamond down to the gravel, somewhere out there. That it's the light from her that keeps us living when we ought to be dead."

"Ought to be dead? Of what?"

He gives her a strange look. "...of anything. Of burning t'death, of a bullet t'the head, of a knife in the throat. Y'haven't heard, how Death's a stranger in London? We die and we rise, sure as the sun don't down here."

"Good heavens! I suppose it might take a mountain of diamond to do something like that." (It's not the most efficient use of that much diamond, she thinks with self-aware presumptuousness.) "And it's only in London that it works that way, as far as you know?"

"All through the Neath. –the big cave we're in. We're in a big cave, case you missed it. S'got room for an ocean, and a couple of continents."

"Huh, the parts of the Underdark I'm used to are more cramped than this. And what are the things that look like stars, if they're not the stars?"

"False-stars," shrugs the workman. "They glow like the real kind, but they move without any cycle. In a year half of them'll be new."

"I suppose I don't know what the stars I'm used to really are either, apart from very far away. Do people still die of old age down here, or do they just keep going?"

"Y'still get old, but instead of a heart attack or passing asleep, y'just go from wrinkly to dusty, falling apart more and more 'til they ship y'off t'the Tomb-Colonies. Y'live a few hundred years there, dustier and dustier 'til... something. Dunno what happens, but y'don't see Tomb-Colonists more'n about a thousand years old."

"Oh no, that doesn't sound good at all. I should look into that situation more, I might be able to improve on it. What other problems are there around here that might benefit from a different kind of magic, or for that matter a disinterested external perspective or being stabbed a lot?"

A lengthy pause.

"...most of 'em? I don't know the details of the magic, but it's a broad sort of question, innit?"

"Well, if you have a lot of problems, which ones are the largest and most urgent and not already having good progress made on them?"

The workman begins to look uneasy. "Listen, I'm really not the man t'ask. I keep my head down, I do my job. Y'could ask the Constables, or the boffins at the University, or... St. Fiacre's is across the street, y'could ask the Bishop if y'like. Wise man, he is."

"Boffins" translates to something not entirely unlike "wizards", which makes the University sound like a high-risk high-reward option: either they won't speak to her, or they'll be completely up their own arses with wizard nonsense, or they'll know exactly what the most important problems she could be working on are and tell her. If she needed to know something obscure, she'd try it. But she doesn't need to know something obscure, she needs to know what everyone knows. And maybe doesn't want to talk about. 

"Fair enough. Can you give me directions to the constables' headquarters?"

Relieved, he gives her only moderately convoluted directions to Concord Square.

Then she'll say her goodbyes and head over there!