And now there's a teenage girl standing on the ice! 

"Well at least now I know it doesn't work," she says, and then notices the zamboni apparently moving on its own.

"Seems to have worked fine to me! Unless you were trying to not teleport, in which case yeah it definitely didn't."

Crud crud crud she specifically specified a place with no humans or critters within a hundred yards or line of sight, what even. "Never mind I just wandered in by accident sorry I'll leave now." She starts heading for the nearest exit, slips on the freshly polished ice and lands on her butt.

"Hey, relax, I didn't mean to scare ya. I'm not gonna get on your ass for trespassing when you didn't do it on purpose. I've just never seen anybody weirder than me before." The zamboni glides over and comes to a stop beside the girl, revealing an aubergine wearing some kind of fancy helmet in the driver's seat.

". . . You're an eggplant?"

Teleporting is not weirder than being a talking eggplant! Probably even being the last of the race of dragons, descendant of a secret survivor of the extinction wars, dating the last surviving sphinx is not weirder than being a talking eggplant! It's kind of arguable, though. She grabs the zamboni's fender and pulls herself upright.

"I prefer 'aubergine'. I'm American but it sounds cooler, y'know? But yup, Ariel the Aubergine, only talking one in the world as far as I've heard. So, who are you, what were you trying to do?"

This is kind of reassuring, actually. Nobody is going to arrest her for breaking the masquerade to a talking aubergine even if . . . he? she? they? aren't technically a critter by some definition her spell thought was relevant.

"I was trying to teleport to a . . ." she shouldn't mention Avalons in case Ariel lives among humans somehow. "a building that definitely doesn't have an ice rink in it, in New York City. What did I hit instead?" It's cold in here, and she wants to put her wings on and wrap them around herself, but she couldn't do that even in front of someone who was definitely a critter. 

"You're at UBS arena in Queens, so you didn't miss too hard. Unless you also traveled in time or whatever, I don't know, it's 2035? May something. 18th. I don't know how teleports work."

"What the heck! It is not 2035!"

"Swear to God. 2035. When were you from?"

"About 30 years ago. I can probably get back the same way I got here but I'll need a lot of paper. I should call my own phone. . . . Except I have no signal in here."

"If you haven't had hurricane Katrina yet you should warn New Orleans about it!"

"Nobody would believe me and also magic is supposed to be a secret. Are you a secret, should I avoid telling anyone in 2005 about you?"

"Ha, no, I was on Oprah. Ooh, are you a CIA agent or something, if I was the CIA I would totally hire teleporting people. Don't tell me if you would have to kill me afterwards." Apparently talking aubergines can also chuckle, because Ariel does so.

"Nope, not a CIA agent; just Margaret the teleporting kid. Is being famous fun? . . . Is being an aubergine fun?"

"Being famous is pretty neat. Going on TV the once was definitely better than answering the same six questions from everyone I meet--not mad at you, you just found out. Being an aubergine . . . it's got its ups and downs? It'd be cool to be able to see without the helmet--it needs a bigger battery than I can carry around--and eat food and stuff, but I wouldn't want to be human all the time. Too much fuss and bother and getting old and creaky."

"You don't age? That's so awesome! Do you have any idea how you ended up--the way you are, in general?"

"Not a clue!" Ariel says cheerfully. "Do you know how your magic works?"

"It's complicated. I should really get out of here and call myself." She hadn't had an exact timeline in mind, but she had guessed she would have expected critters and runecasting to be common knowledge by 2035, and the fact that her and Bella's future selves didn't go ahead with the reveal is evidence of--something. Probably nothing good.

"And I gotta finish up here before the teams arrive. Want to meet up in the lobby in like half an hour? I can catch you up on future knowledge so you don't have to tell anyone else."

"Hopefully I'll be able to get a lot of that from my future self, but--yeah. Yeah, that would be good. See you then." She slowly, carefully shuffles across the ice into the stands.

"Seeya!" Ariel waves and goes back to zamboniing. Half an hour later, he meets Margaret in the lobby, now wielding one of those red and white canes with a ball on the end, and leads her into a little "staff only" closet where nobody will stare at them or want to know why they're discussing time travel.

Margaret is looking troubled. "So apparently what happened was more complicated than just time travel. I don't exist here. I'm from some kind of alternate timeline where George Bush got elected in 2000 and in this timeline I was apparently never born. Or at least I never posted anything on the internet with my name or any username I can remember having and neither did my parents." Also critters have zero internet presence whatsoever and the building next door that usually contains the entrance to the New York avalon doesn't, so there's no masquerade for her to have broken.

"Well, shit. Are you still gonna be able to get home okay?"

"I think so, yeah. It's going to take me a while, maybe a couple of weeks, but I can."

"That's good, I suppose. Are you gonna need a place to crash? My apartment is kind of a shoebox but it's not literally a shoebox and it does have a couch."

"That's--really nice of you, thank you. I would say I don't want to impose but honestly I kind of do want to impose because my alternative is probably sleeping in a homeless shelter."

"Teach me about magic and I'll call it even."

"I probably shouldn't actually teach you to do magic, it's really dangerous for anyone who isn't me, but I can teach you about it, sure. Actually, I bet I could make you a headband or something that would let you see all the time. It'd take a bunch of tries but copying your helmet won't be harder than getting back to my own universe."

"That would be great. I could go to the theater and see the performances instead of just hearing them, I could see Times Square and the ocean and--it would be really great. It wouldn't be exactly like getting to experience the world the same way humans do, but it would be really close."

"Then I will definitely do that. And also, if I figure out how to get back and forth between our universes--no promises, I can't be sure it will work, but there's someone else in my universe with a different kind of magic that might be able to let you turn into a human and back."

"Woah, no shit? And I definitely won't get old and creaky or anything?"

"I definitely would not do anything that might result in you getting old and creaky. Like I said, I can't promise anything there, it's a lot more complicated than copying the thing that lets you see, but--I've seen it work for other nonhumans where I come from." Technically not false, and she doesn't want to get into the question of her own species just yet, even if Ariel seems more likely to get it than anyone other than Bella.

"That'd be mad cool. Even just eyes that don't weigh a hundred pounds would be mad cool. And you just need pencil and paper?"

"Yup. And a protractor but the kind of art stores that have giant paper should have those too."

"Then as soon as I've done the halftime cleanup, let's do it!"