She laughs. "You're really not."

And she leaves.

He stays standing out on the balcony. His eyes flick between the sky and the street below. The clouds might mean something, and he has to know, he has to know what might happen, but-- looking directly at the unknown you cannot yet understand, having it hover between just out of reach and not actually there-- it's awful. (The people on the street might mean something to. Maybe something more mundane, someone he might meet in the future. Maybe not.)

Magic is real. It's real. It's fact of the world and he has to-- live with it and know it. It's not that he didn't believe Parker had killed someone by drying them out to death. But he believed it as a tool. As a crime Parker did that he could be charged with. Not as-- you can steal someone's life force to live longer, that you can use a whistle to make a spell more powerful, that spells are real and he could learn one.

The dreams are real. ...maybe both kinds. The palaces and the carefully being disassembled in pagan rituals.

...it would be nicer if it wasn't the disassembling dream he was most confident on. If that creature carrying him away hadn't been the shape of the whistles he hadn't yet seen.

He's going to have to keep a dream journal. And-- not believe, but know magic. And now he can never explain it to anyone but Evie.

Meanwhile-- 

After stalking away from Ichiro Sano, Oscar wanders, until he finds himself at a park he sometimes goes to, staring at a lake.

As he stares, he blinks, and for a moment he can see twin suns sinking behind the lake, and he knows that it is Hali.

...Generally that lake gives him at least a distraction from his troubles. It's like the familiar sights of the world have given way to the reality that magic is real and that the version of the world containing magic is, if anything, more intractably horrifying.

At least there aren't a lot of people here.

"Oscar? - Oscar, is that you?" Terrence is a little out of breath as he spots and makes a beeline for a familiar figure.

Oscar startles visibly.

That's fair.

"Terrence," he says-- with a rather flat affect.

"Sorry if I spooked you - I was just in the area - um, I happened to be by your shop, and it looked, um, well. What happened? Are you alright, my dear fellow?"

"It's closed," Oscar says miserably. "Public morals people shut it down." He doesn't engage at all with the question about his condition, though Terrence seems pretty sincere, and he has no idea what to do with it. ("We have disposable people for that", he thinks involuntarily.)

Terrence is probably going to ask a terrible follow-up question like "What are you going to do about that", huh.

"Oh good lord. ...I'm sorry."

"Yeah," Oscar says lamely.

And my main source of funding was an evil reactionary sorcerer, and I just tried to punch him, and I am pretty sure that he's going to win Sal and Inaaya over by sheer genteel Reasonableness. (None of which he can say to Terrence.)

"Do you need.... help? Money?"

Terrence wants to help?

Terrence wonders if he's overstepped.

"I," he says. "I'm not sure yet. We're going to need... a lot of money, for legal fees, and my family... That was my one source of income."

If it were just him, at this point he's not even sure he'd try to ask.

"Ah." Terrence nods a little. "I'll, I'll look at my checkbook once I'm home. See what I can do."

"Thank you," Oscar says. He's not sure how to feel about this but there are no obvious terrible strings attached.

"Terrence," he says after a pause. He really doesn't want to get into this now but this may be his only chance.

"Yes, Oscar?"

"I need to warn you about something."

Terrence is probably going to give him the Sal-and-Inaaya "we hear you but you're worrying us are you okay" treatment. But-- doesn't Oscar owe him, given the stakes.

Terrence comes closer at least, since Terrence does not appear to be royally intruding on his brooding. Or if he is, Oscar's at least cool with it. "What is it?"

Oscar continues to look stressed out and miserable, but doesn't move away. Apparently Terrence doesn't think he's a violent madman-- though that'll probably change whenever he hears from Sal or Inaaya.

"Please don't trust Ichiro Sano," Oscar says.

"...That man had a thug threaten my life."

Pause.

"Wait, how do you know Ichiro Sano?"

"...I worked in rare books until quite recently." A weak smile.