She's in a bar.  There's even more magic in the bar than Aeslin expected to find in the royal palace.

The bar's decorated with a festive winter theme.  Fireplaces are around the hall, with fires crackling in them.  Garlands of holly and ivy and pine branches drape the wood-paneled walls.  Snow is falling near the large windows that look out on stars and exploding stars.

(And somehow, the logs in the fireplace never seem to be consumed by the crackling flames, and the snow never seems to melt on the floor even though it shouldn't be anywhere near cold enough for it to stay snow.)

There're some chairs and couches scattered near the fireplaces, but at one end of the room, a long bartop stretches across the space, stools positioned along it at staggered intervals.

Sitting on one of those stools is a woman, not entirely dissimilar-looking to Aeslin, albeit seemingly a few years older, a might bit taller for it, and with the tan complexion of someone who works outdoors. Her clothes are utterly unlike Aeslin's though, wearing heavy and worn leather jacket, pants, and shoes over what might be rough linen underclothes. Notably, she's absolutely saturated with an unfamiliar magic, to a similar degree as the rest of the bar but with a subtly different character.

She seems to be alternatively writing and reading small notes on the bar's counter as she sips on a glass of eggnog, evidently not noticing Aeslin's entrance.

(Aeslin is wearing a plain blue blouse and red ankle-length skirt, with the small gold crown-and-starburst arms of the Royal Research Mages below the collar, and a few small crystals hanging at her belt.  Gwen kept despairing about her clothes, but no matter how much magic had gone into its being easy to maintain fancy dresses, it was still even easier to just not wear them in the first place.  Besides, the spells to keep them poofy sometimes interfered with her work.)

This's all too much magic even if someone decided to redecorate the palace, and the wrong sort of magic at that.

Aeslin waves her wand again, to check for dream-magic, in case someone cast a sleep spell on her...  Nope, not that.  She's awake.

She checks herself for any spells that might be on her...  Nope, she's clean of anything except for the alarm-spells she cast on herself.

She pokes up to invoke the palace Web system to ask someone what happened...  She's not really surprised to find that the Web isn't there at all.

"Okay then," she says aloud.  "Is this some sort of portal or magic pouch straight out of the Days of Wonder?  Er, Your Majesty, I know you're the least-illogical candidate for making one of those - congratulations, if that's what you were doing, and, er, if you can hear me?"

The woman starts slightly upon hearing Aeslin's words before spinning around on her stool, smiling and giving her a congenial wave. "Oh, hello! Sorry if you were talking to me, I was bit distracted talking with Bar." She notices the wand Aeslin is holding at semi-ready and her eyes widen with gleaming interest. "Ooh, is that a wand? Are you doing magic?"

Nope, that definitely isn't Queen Elethy.  No idea who in all the world would be that surprised by magic, either.

"Yes - I'm trying to find out where I am and who you are.  Do you by any chance remember Elves?  If so, you've been trapped in a magic pouch -"  Just in time, she remembers that it's probably best not to lead with how long it's been since anyone knew how to make the sort of magic pouch this would have to be.

The woman shakes her head negatively. "No, I don't think-- Well, hm." She scratches her chin and looks off into space. "It might depend on what you mean by elves? I don't think of uncle as an elf but I can sort of see him counting depending on what sort of elf you mean." She refocused on Aeslin. "Anyway, I'm Ira! And this is Milliways, it's a, what did Bar say...interdimensional? I think it was interdimensional. Milliways is an interdimensional bar and inn, I think is what they said, or close enough." She turns around for a moment to take a sip of her eggnog before facing back towards Aeslin.

"An interdimensional bar!  I've never heard of that!  I guess I suppose someone back in the Age of Wonders could've coupled a pouch with a cornucopia - but how would it reach out to more dimensions - and we've never heard of any of that -"

She slips her wand into her belt and runs up to the bar and the woman.  "Bar - can you hear me, or do I need magic to address you?"

A napkin appears on the bar in front of Aeslin.

"I can hear you.  I have my own magic; not all my patrons have magic of their own.

"Welcome to Milliways, the bar at the end of the multiverse - or, you might say, in the middle of the multiverse.  I am Bar.  Your first drink is free, if you would like one."  

Aeslin turns back to the woman, beaming.  "How'd you get here?  How long have you been here?  What magic do you know - have you met anyone with different magic -"

"I was walking inside after checking on our chickens and ended up in Milliways! That's how Milliways works, by the way, replacing doorways like that. I've only been here maybe an hour or two? I didn't think to check the time when I came in, we don't have any clocks back in the house. I know about lots of magics, if I'm allowed to count fictional kinds, but if hose don't count the only thing I know about is the hearth's magic. I'm not really an expert on exactly how it works, not as much as uncle or grandma are, but I think I still have a pretty good idea! And, there's Bar! They're very magical. And if you're magical then there's you too. But you're only the second person I've met here so far, and the first human-shaped one."

"Your uncle - is that the uncle who's maybe an Elf?  How does that work?  Where I'm from, you either are an Elf or you aren't.  It's... it's an open question whether you can say I am magical, but if I am it's not like Elves who're inherently magical - it's just that I'm alive and I'm a person.  But I can definitely do magic, and I've got magic on me."

She gestures across her face in the standard alarm-spell gesture, only realizing a moment later that the woman wouldn't recognize it.  "The spells I've cast on myself," she explains.  "And then the residue from all the spells I've cast elsewhere."

Ira nods as Aeslin explains. "Uncle is, hm. The way he usually says it is that he's a part of the hearth, combined with a part of grandma, but he's always told me that's an oversimplification. He's definitely inherently magical, he's warm like the hearth and his hair is all floaty." Ira gestures with hands, raising a couple handles of her own dark locks up into the air before dropping them. "And he can wrestle the cave-sleeper and just get tired and scratched up, and probably lots of other stuff but I don't know exactly what since he doesn't like to use it without knowing exactly what it's going to do and how it works. But, yeah, he's definitely more magical than me or grandma. But I have no idea if there's anything about being an elf other than that, so who knows! I certainly can't do magic, or I guess maybe just don't know how if everybody can. What sort of magic can you do? What spells do you have on right now? If that's not rude to ask."

"Oh wow!

"It's not rude at all!  My best spell, I guess, is my dreamwalking - I rediscovered it myself from an old book the Queen had written ages ago, and I'm still the only person who can reliably do it other than the Queen herself.  And maybe Svarendar, but he never really does it.  But other than that, I'm in the Royal Research Mages" (she taps the coat-of-arms on her blouse) "- I've been trying to improve the spellwagons and farm spells and new long-range ward spells and all sorts of things like that."

There's no need to mention she was hoping to cast those long-range wards on the entire border with the Crystal Mountains, even though this woman's definitely from another world.

"On myself, I've got some alarm spells so I don't lose track of time before my next my appointments, and then the personal shield - even though I'm in the palace, or I was, there's no reason not to have that.  And then there're these crystals... I charged one of them this morning to record my voice, if you want to hear it?"

She holds up a clear crystal dangling from her belt.  It's not really shining, but it's glistening in the light.

"Sure! But, what are dreamwalking and spellwagons? And, what sort of spells do you use for farming? How do you do magic in general, if that's not too vague a question?"

"Ooh, I could talk about that for hours!  For spellwagons - there're lines of crystals and metal across the country, charged with magic, with spells cast on them.  And then you put a wagon on the line, with a large crystal charged with magic with a different spell cast on it, and it can move down the metal line by itself!  You don't need a horse, and one crystal can pull a whole train of wagons between cities!  That's been around for maybe a hundred years, but it's been expanded a lot since then, and there've been new improvements to make it move faster with even less magic, or more resilient against its being disrupted - I'm hoping to get it more resilient; we've had some... mischief-makers, you could say.  Or you could call them criminals."  She briefly frowns, and then shakes her head.  "It's an interesting problem, for all that most people don't care about it.  And spellwagons in general are one of the ways I can say we're clearly ahead of even the Days of Wonder.  You could travel faster back then if you were lucky, by roc or dragon or magic boots, but most people didn't get to use any of those and they just had to ride a horse or walk!  Now, anyone can buy a ride in the spellwagons!

"In general - magic flows around the earth, but most things can't sense it.  Or maybe the human body does instinctively and that's why we're living people; that's not my field.  But anyway, you need to catch it and conduct it to do anything with it, and for that you need - well, if you don't have an Elf or a dragon or something like that, in practice you need wood or leaves from one of a few plants."  She taps her wand.  "Even crystals can't catch it, though they can store it.  And you also need your own living mind behind it to direct the wand, of course.  Would you like to try?"

"Fascinating! And, which first, the sound-crystal or the wand?" Ira takes another sip of her eggnog, then seems to realize something. "Sorry, I never gave you a chance to introduce yourself, or take a seat or order something!"

"Oh!  And - you said you're Ira?"

Aeslin slips onto a stool next to Ira's.  "I'm Aeslin.  Er, Bar, can I have a pear cider?"

A glass cup of pear cider appears in front of Aeslin.

"I should've had my wand out to see if I could sense the magic!"

Aeslin shakes her head and takes a small swallow of the cider.  "Just like it is from home.  Crystal first, why not; I'll try you on a simple spell but it still might take some time to get the hang of a wand."

She unties the sound-crystal from her belt and taps it with her wand.

Her voice - sounding exactly like her voice, but a little muffled as if she's speaking from the next room over - comes from the crystal:  "They were shut unshakeable.  Then shrilled a trumpet as a phantom fanfare faintly winding in the hill from hollow halls far under; a creaking portal with clangour backward was flung, and forth there flashed a throng, leaping lightly, lances wielding, and swift encircling seized bewildered the wanderers wayworn, wordless haled them -"

Aeslin taps the crystal again, and it falls silent.  "That's an old poem I was reading from the Days of Wonder.  It might have some clues for one or another project I'm on - but I don't know.  I wish they'd been clearer!"

"Mhm!" She replies before listening to the crystal, and to Aeslin's explanation. "Huh! That actually sounds a lot like a poem from one of the books my mother wished for, I think. I haven't read it in ages but it was one of the ones that really got me into thinking of stories as being parts of worlds rather than as just, strings of events, I remember. Maybe I could help you with that project? Just as a fresh outside perspective if nothing else. After the wand?"

"Oh, yes, so many stories seem to be written as if they were just a sequence of events - they don't say which Elvenking it was or where he reigned - we don't even know for sure whether the Crystal Mountains even existed back in the Days of Wonder!  But still, if the Queen doesn't know something about magic, half the time the best bet is to try piecing through the old stories for clues as to how their spells might have worked..."

Ira nods some more. "Wow, your queen must know an awful lot about magic! And, you've mentioned a couple times but I'm not actually sure how to picture these Crystal Mountains." Ira shakes herself a little. "But, magic! Magic I might be able to do, with a wand?"

"Oh yes!  Queen Elethy is an Elf, maybe the last Elf alive - she was too young to remember any of the Days of Wonder herself, but she's learned a whole lot about magic; she's the one who founded the Royal Research Mages, and if it wasn't for her I don't think magic would be anywhere near as widespread -

"But anyway, the wand!"  Aeslin holds out her wand to Ira, holding the middle, with the handle-end toward Ira.  It's a straight stick, a little shorter than Ira's forearm, with a few rings carved in it around the middle.  The handle end is textured, clearly designed to let you get a good grip.  The other end is perfectly smooth, very well-polished, and tapering just a little toward the end.

"Take it with your hand, either hand.  To start with... start with the kids' light spell.  You can wave it in a small circle if you want, but the important part is to be thinking about a small light on the end of the wand and envisioning the magic flowing through the wand to make the light."

Ira forms an odd expression briefly, before delicately grasps the wand's handle, nodding as seriously as she can with a wide grin pulling at her lips. "Is there any, uh, trick to the visualization? Is magic more like wind or water or something else, with how it moves, or is it more a personal thing?"

"... Like water.  Or even more like mud or like pudding, until it gets moving - until the spell starts - and then it's like water."

Ira nods. "And, where is it coming from? Am I catching it from the air, like, floating raindrops, or drawing it up from the ground, or somewhere else? And, I assume I'm directing through the wand and up to its tip, where I'm imagining the light is coming from?"

"From... the earth or the air, either one; I'm realizing I've thought of them pretty interchangeably myself...  Either of your images should work fine.  And yes, through the wand to its tip; the light appears at the tip or maybe a little ways out from it.  Don't imagine it going through your arm; that usually doesn't work - we're not Elves - and if it does it might hurt your arm."

Ira nods once more, stands from her chair despite not being instructed to do so (perhaps out of some sense of gravitas), and closes her eyes to aid in visualization. She imagines the magic as a semi-gelid fluid permeating the air, maybe more like slush than mud, that melts into water as she impels it to flow, spiraling like a vortex flowing down a drain towards the base of the wand then up and through it, shirking its pseudo-aqueous form and becoming light as soon as it emerges from the wind's tip. Without letting go of the visual, she opens her eyes to see if it's worked.

Just before she opens her eyes, she feels in her hand and wrist the ghost of some movement, sort of as if some slush was being sucked up all around her hand and through her fingers - except she's not actually feeling it with her senses; it's sort of like she's imagining it but her imagination has gained life and is continuing without her meaning to.

And then she opens her eyes, and she can see a faint shining light on the tip of the wand.

"Wow!  You did it on your first try!"

Ira beams and giggles a bit. She's no longer devoting her focus entirely to the visualization but that may not mean it stops? "This is incredible! Is doing it on your first try extraordinary?" She asks this with some poorly hidden hopeful pride. "Oh, and you mentioned something a moment ago, about your queen being the last elf. Does that mean that people can stop being elves? Or, were they killed by something you can't bring them back from?" She frowns a moment as she realizes something. "Oh, you might not have a way to bring people back at all! I'm sorry if that was insensitive."

(As long as she's keeping it in the back of her mind, it keeps going.)

"Yes it is!  And it's even more unusual that you can keep it going even while you're talking - maybe it's something to do with your world or some magic there? --"

Aeslin suddenly stops.

"You - can - bring people back?  From being dead?"

Ira promptly stops trying to hide her pride, which redoubles under Aislin's praise. "Well, Bran- that's my uncle, I don't think I introduced him yet, Bran is certain we can, he says he revived my grandma when he was just a boy, when she fell ill and died, but for as long as I've existed the only person we know well enough to bring back who is dead is my mom, who was killed by the cave-sleeper, which is means we can't bring her back. But we bring the chickens back whenever they die."

"You can bring back people - or animals - as long as you know them well enough?  How well do you need to know them?  And how do you cast the spell!?"

Ira tilts her head back and forth uncertainly. "Maybe that isn't the right phrasing. We need to, sort of, prove that they were real? We usually use one of the chicken's bones or feathers, which seems to be enough for them, and uncle says he just told the hearth about grandma's body in the bedroom. And, I don't know if it's a spell really? It's the same as any other wish on Wishing Night, aside from the proof thing. We give our gifts to the hearth, we ask the hearth to bring them back, we tell it our proof, and then it does its weird little spirits thing, and in the morning the wish is granted if the hearth could manage it, or else it does the best it can manage."

"So if I come to your world - if I can do that - after getting someone's bone - if I can do that and come back here - tell me more about this hearth and what it does?"

"Can other people go to the Pines? Bar?" Ira asks as she sits back down, still holding onto the wand and sustaining the light spell. "And, I don't know exactly? I've only stayed up to watch the answering once, and that was a few years ago and I'm still not entirely sure what parts of it were real and what parts were dreams. I know that light and dark get all weird, and then it sort of, splits up into a bunch little person-shaped spirits that float around and sort of turn into the answers to our wishes? It's hard to explain. Other than that, the hearth is just the fire in our fireplace. Or, actually I think Bran says that it makes the Sun during the day, too? But I've never seen it do anything to make the Sun, Bran figured it out some other way."

Another napkin appears on the bar.

"I do not control the door.  Unfortunately, the Landlords will not let the door bring people into worlds not their own today. It will likely be different tomorrow."

"Who are these Landlords, and how does the door work?...  Also, may I have a mug of tea?"  She takes a silver coin out of a pocket in her skirt.

The coin vanishes, to be replaced with several brass coins and a large steaming mug of tea.  There's also another napkin:

"I do not know, and the clues I do know, I cannot express in your language."

Ira takes another sip of eggnog, and thinks to hand Aeslin her wand back, the light spell presumably terminating when it leaves Ira's hand. "It's frustrating, when there's just a dead end like that. I'm sorry if I got your hopes up about bringing people back right now. We can always ask again tomorrow, if you can afford to stay the night?"

"People are expecting me back home... but no, for this, I can stay.

"I don't know anything like your hearth magic - it sounds almost like dream symbolism!  But you saw it in your waking life?  What sort of wishes can it answer?"

Another napkin appears.

"While you are in here, time is stopped in your home world, except while you are holding open the door to your home world."

(The door shut behind Aeslin once she entered.)

"Oh, yes, sorry I forgot to mention the time-thing. And, most sorts of wishes I think? Not quite all of them, I know that it can't send us to other worlds, or at least it can't reach the worlds that my mother or grandma came from, and can't take us to worlds we don't know. Bran hasn't figured out how exactly it does most of what it does yet, and we usually need two or sometimes all three of our wishes each year to keep the house running, bring back the chickens, heal any injuries or illnesses we can't fix with medicine, so we don't have the option to experiment much. I don't have a list of everything we've ever wished for memorized or anything, but if you give me a wish I can probably tell whether it's like something one of us has wished for?"

Now that Aeslin knows she has all the time she wants to ask questions and talk, she has even more questions than before!   

"Your mother and grandmother are from other worlds?  How'd they get there - did they come through this bar too?  How're those other worlds different?  And do other people in your world have other wish-granting fires too - it sounds like you don't have any schools about them at least; do you know if anyone's tried anything like that?"

Ira nods. "Mhm. Uh, well the people and places were different between them, and neither of them were anything like the Pines. Neither of them had the hearth or anything like the hearth, though they both had places that had similar plants and animals and terrain as around the house. They both had humans, but nobody like uncle, and neither of them had elves, or at least not as far as my mother or grandma knew about. My mother and grandma both were fleeing from big, like really massive destruction, catastrophe on a global scale or bigger. They needed desperately to be somewhere else, somewhere safer, and I guess they were lucky and the hearth managed to reach them and bring them into the Pines. Neither of them mentioned anything like Milliways existing, though they both had stories of places like it, just, fictional ones. And, I don't know if there's much point of starting a school, at least in the Pines? It's just me, grandma, and uncle. Bran probably knows enough to teach about it, at least a bit, but I can already talk with him about it whenever I want and grandma always says that her 'curiosity about the hearth has been more than satisfied'."

"Wait, you're the only people in your whole world!?  Or at least the only people you've seen?"

Ira nods again. "Or, well, the cave-sleeper might be a person too, but it's never talked to us or anything, it attacks us or runs away whenever we see it, so if it is a person it's an awfully nasty one."

"You don't know how - were there ever any more people in your world?  Or might there be some somewhere else in the world?  And what's the cave-sleeper?"

"Grandma says there weren't any other people when she first came. If there were people there before her who left, they didn't leave anything behind. I guess there might be some people out in the Grass? But with how weird it is I don't know if I'd believe they were real people until they came out to the Pines. I haven't ever actually seen anything that looks like a person out there, though." She takes another sip of eggnog. "The cave-sleeper's a big scary shadow-monster that lives in a cave on the other side of the Pines from the house. Bran says that under all the shadow-stuff it's some kind of bear, though."

"And if the cave-sleeper kills someone, then the Hearth can't resurrect them?"

Aeslin sips her tea.

"What you're saying about the Hearth was making me wonder whether it's a person.  But... how is the Grass weird too?  Maybe your world really works differently?"

"Yeah. Bran things that the cave-sleeper can do something that interferes with the hearth when it tries to, uh, undo what the cave-sleeper has done, I think is how he said it? And the hearth might be a person, I know Bran would say that it is in some ways and isn't in others, though I couldn't give you any more explanation. The Grass though is, uh." She searches for words for a moment. "It's inconsistent? Earlier you said that the way the hearth works makes you think of dream symbolism, but the Grass is what really makes me think of dreams. When I go up to the roof to get fresh air during the summer, If I look out at a spot in the Grass, I might see a stream or a lone tree or some other thing, but if I turn around then look back, it might be gone or look different."

"Well, that's just shapeshifting...  Do you know what Bran says the cave-sleeper might be doing?"

"He mostly agrees with grandma and thinks that it's trying to get us to go away, either by killing us or getting us to run off into the Grass and disappear, so that it can take the hearth back."

"If your family's the only other people there...  Maybe?  It won't talk with you?  And the Hearth isn't clear?"

Ira shakes her head. "Bran has been working on figuring out a way for him to communicate with the hearth more easily, but he hasn't gotten anything yet, and trying to talk to the hearth-spirits when they come out during the answering doesn't work very well. We could use a wish for the answer, probably at least? Or maybe the same thing about the cave-sleeper that makes it so we can't revive my mother means the hearth can't answer questions about it. It's risky to use one of our wishes on something the hearth might not be able to do, especially the last few years when we've usually needed all three for other things."

""There has to be some other way to learn about your world.  Maybe if we can investigate it with our magic...

"And if you've just been by yourself - if there's no school - there must be so much you haven't learned!  You say you've got books, at least - is there anything particular you want to learn?"

"Maybe! Time starts again if I open the door, so maybe I could open it and you cast some kind of information-gathering spell through it? I don't really know what sort of things are achievable with your magic yet."

Ira gives Aeslin a slightly confused look at that question. "I don't know if there's anything in particular I don't want to learn, given the time and opportunity? I guess, there are some stories about concepts or ideas that are dangerous to have in your head, which I suppose if magic and elves and Milliways are all real might be real too, but otherwise I think I'd like to learn everything I can."

"I could teach you more magic!  Or I could tell you more about my country's history - well, you aren't on the same world, but you don't really have a country around you where you are!"

Ira nods delightedly. "Both of those sound good!" Her expression grows a little bashful. "I suppose I am a bit more interested in learning more magic. Casting that light spell was fascinating and it's exciting to hear that I have some kind of talent for it."

"The next exercises we normally do in school are just to make it reliable, to build up the habit of getting the magic to work every time - but I don't think you need to do that; you got it on the first time!  How about trying for finer control - make a red light this time?  Same as last time - make the magic flow through the wand to the tip, but this time, make sure you're imagining a red light.  And, maybe you can try for one a bit brighter too?"

Ira nods again, quietly reacquiring the wand and rebuilding her visualization. She imagines the flow of the vortex as being faster and harder and hotter, operating purely on intuition, to feed the light at the end of the wand more magic, as well as imagining the light as brighter and redder, more like the outer flames of the hearth than the dim yellow-white of a candle.

Once more, she feels in her hand the ghost of something like slush being sucked up - faster this time, rushing over and through her hand in the something-like-imagination that's the magic.  When she opens her eyes, she sees a big ball of red light standing on the end of her wand.

"You did it again!"

Ira laughs delightfully!

“Oh, I have an idea!” She exclaims, promptly closing her eyes again. She attempts to regain conscious control of her pseudo-imagination, and assuming she can, she’ll alter the visualization, changing it so that rather than immediately turning into light after leaving the top of the wand, it becomes a sort of intermediate thing, still invisible like the slush-magic is, but directed and purposeful, sort of shooting out from the top of her wand, traveling and heating up before sort of ‘evaporating’ into the same ball of red light, now separated from the wand by a significant distance and, hopefully, movable by changing the direction she points the wand in.

Having put that all together, she trepidatiously opens her eyes.

Even before she opens her eyes, she's feeling the magic stronger this time, and differently - like she's feeling it with her real senses as well as with her imagination.

When she opens her eyes, she sees the red ball is smashed against the ceiling of the bar, and her hands are red as if they're sunburned.

“Oh!” Even if her hands aren’t hurting like a sunburn it’s still quite surprising to see. She’ll quickly cut off the visualization, which will hopefully make the redness go away. Then she’ll look to Aeslin to check her reaction and maybe receive some guidance.

The sunburn subsides a little, but it doesn't fully subside.  (The red light against the ceiling does vanish.)

"Good work again - you got it to move!  A little too far and too fast, though, I'm thinking?  But that will come with practice.

"The first thing is, you're channeling too much magic too broadly.  When you're working with large amounts of magic - like I do a lot - you need to keep it really tightly focused on your wand because your hands aren't built to interact with that much.  We aren't Elves.  But then, you don't need all that much magic for something like this, so it's best to just summon less magic.  What were you trying to do there?"

“I was imagining it as a vortex feeding into the base of the wand, I guess just because that feels like a natural way for a fluid to flow. Before I was having the flowing magic just directly turn into light at the end of the wand, and then I had an idea for how to make extend further away, by having the magic turn into something sort of, half-way between the not-water and the light, something that’s invisible and that can still flow but will turn into light on its own. Since, the wand is how we control the magic right? So I figured once the magic flows out of the end, it needs to be set and ready to do what we want, since it’s going through the wand anymore and maybe isn’t totally under our control at that point?”

"Yes... but that shouldn't change the amount of magic at all.  Your burns, and the light going all the way against the ceiling are both pointing to your channeling too much magic.  Did you mean to be changing anything about that?"

"Oh, actually, yes, but just before, when I increased the brightness. I just, figured that more light would need more magic?"

"Yes, but your hands didn't get burned then.  It must've been something new this time..."

"Oh, I've got an idea!  Give me the wand to check something?"

Aeslin grabs the wand and waves it in a knot-like motion toward Ira.  Ira doesn't see any glow coming from the wand, but some sparks fly out of her own arms.

"Oh wow!" Aeslin exclaims.  "You actually do have some magic in you, just like Elves!  Maybe your uncle really is an Elf?  Or maybe the Hearth put something in you!?"

Ira is briefly fascinated by the sparks. "Maybe? We do also use it as a hearth, cook our food over it, boil our water with it, that sort of thing, so maybe the magics get into things and then into us?"

"Maybe?  I've used magic ovens - well, eaten food cooked with magic ovens - most of my life, and I'm still not magic.  Well, okay, I might as well check..."

She points the wand at herself and weaves it in the same knot, but no sparks are visible.

Ira shrugs and asks with a somewhat joking tone, "Are they magic wish-granting ovens?"

"No, we don't have any magic wish-granters!  This's so exciting!

"Hey, Bar, what're you?  Are you a golem crafted by magic?"

Another napkin:  "I am Bar.  I do not know how I was made."

"Do you know anything about it?"

"I know I am a bar, and that is enough."

Ira sighs in commiseration. "I was awfully curious too, and still am. Bar is not the type to talk about themself too much, unfortunately."

She'll take another sip of eggnog, gingerly stroke her hand, and ask, "So, what does having magic like this mean? For learning magic, I mean. If you know, with the queen being the last elf I can imagine there might be a lot of lost knowledge about how the process could be different?"

"At least this isn't really something that's been lost - there's so much we've lost from the Days of Wonder, but the Queen would know how this affects learning magic because she had to learn it herself!  It'd be some really archaic methods of teaching, of course - but I learned in an unusual way myself too; Svarendar has his own unique ideas - anyway, I'm afraid I don't know much about how it'd affect you.  The Queen hasn't shared much, just a few bits for abstract comparative studies... and I'm afraid I only studied them in the context of trying to understand golemcrafting."

Ira nods. "Another thing to look into, if the door is cooperative tomorrow. And I think you've mentioned that name a couple times now, Svarendar. Who is he?"

"Svarendar!  The Headmaster of my school; one of my first real teachers.  He helped me learn so much.  He's a dragon, probably the last dragon - the Queen raised him from an egg, back before she was Queen.  They worked together for several hundred years, but he eventually left her to found a school... I know they argued around that and they're still not fully made up, but they still aren't telling why."

Ira eye's practically sparkle with wonder. "A dragon! Wow! What does he look like? What does he sound like? What was learning from him like? What--" Her mood crashes into another case of (probably) 'the last', "Oh. Do you know what happened to the other dragons? Is it related to what happened to the elves?"

"He's so large, with sparkling green scales all over.  His foot's half as broad as his desk.  He puffs smoke from his nose when he's thinking..."

As she speaks, she sketches an illusion of him in the air with her magic, sitting back with his mouth half-open showing large teeth, and one forepaw raised in the air as if gesturing to explain some point.

"... We met in his office, usually; he'd hardly fit in half the classrooms.  He taught me so much about magic, and guided me through so much in the library that I don't think any other teacher really knew.  I thought he had so many advanced books in the library for himself, but he said they were really there for people like me - and he would always be there even when all the human mages were doing other things they thought were more important than teaching."  She chuckles a little.  "He never said they weren't more important; he didn't try to keep me when Queen Elethy accepted me as a Research Mage.  But then he never said they were either...  Toward the end, he was getting cryptic with me sometimes, but then he had his reasons.  I really did need to learn to work with other people more and explain myself better."

Her smile dips.  "What happened to the Elves... was the Last War.  They fought, with magic probably stronger and more intricate than anything we know today.  We don't know how; we don't know for a fact they killed all of each other at once then - Elethy and her brother was young at the time, and she was hidden away in the wilderness, or else she probably wouldn't have survived.  And what she did see of the war, she hasn't shared."

(Aeslin did see in the Queen's dreams once, an image of mountains blasted away while whole forests are twisted into weird geometry the eye can't grasp - but she knows better than to tell that to anyone.)

"So we have the tales of the surviving humans, passed down through generations.  Nobody we know of saw an Elf after that, save Queen Elethy, and her brother who died some time later.  We don't even have rumors.  Maybe some people saw a few dragons after that - but not much after, save Svarendar.  Of course, the world is large and magic travel isn't fast enough or common enough, so maybe somewhere far away?  But the Queen and Svarendar aren't even hoping anymore."

Ira nods once more. "He sounds like a wonderful teacher, and a wonderful person in general. I hope I get to meet him, and, if I do I look forward to hearing what he has to say."

She gets a distinctly thoughtful look on her face as Aeslin describes the Last War. "How long ago was the Last War?"

"About five hundred years.  It was about a hundred years after that before the Queen founded Suinel, depending on how you count the founding."

"I ask because, going from what stories my mother and grandma told, the Last War sounds a lot like how things were when they fled to the Pines? So, I'm wondering if it's possible some of them may have passed through it all that time ago. They're almost certainly not still there-- unless, maybe if they're in the cave-sleeper's cave? I don't know. But even if they're not, if they did leave, maybe they're still alive out there, and maybe the hearth could remember them, maybe even reach out and contact them?"

"Oh wow!  But - five hundred years?  How old are they?  Time would need to be different in your world - or the Hearth would need to be really good at healing magic and our theories about life-webs would have to be wrong - but wait!  You've got magic in your body!  That would change your life-web so much!  So if they have that too, maybe?"

"Who? The elves who maybe-- oh, my mother and grandma? My mother was a bit older than I am now when she died, I think, so maybe her early thirties? And grandma is in her seventies. But, I don't think either of them came from your world. But they came from different worlds from each other, so, maybe your world could have reached the Pines too, in the right conditions?"

"Maybe?  I wish I knew more about traveling between worlds.  I wish I knew anything about it."

Ira nods with a sigh. "Yeah."

She takes another sip of her eggnog and is quiet for a while. "I don't know if there's anything else you'd like to talk about? This all feels a bit sad." She considers it for a moment. "You mentioned that you discovered some kind of magic, I think? Something related to dreams?"

"Dreamwalking!  I cast spells on myself before I go to sleep, and then I can recognize I'm dreaming and walk into other people's dreams and change the dreams around and wake them up within the dream and talk with them!  I don't think you can do it yourself - it takes a lot of practice; I'm still the only person who can do it besides the Queen and Svarendar - but if we're still here tonight I could walk into your dreams...

"...and hey, why not stay here all day and finish studying this book?"

She thumps the large book she carried in, and then takes another large swallow of tea.

Ira nods with a bit of a smile. "It's not taking time from anything else! Do you think I could read along with you? I understand if that'd be weird."

Aeslin shrugs.  "Not sure if it'd work, but sure.  I can start again at the beginning if you want; I've got the time to study it again now..."

She takes a small notebook and pen out of a pocket in her skirt that didn't appear to be there till she put her hand there, and flips it open.

Ooh, magic pockets! But, Ira will resist asking about that now since there's a New Book to consume. She might order some food to snack on and maybe a glass of water once she finished her eggnog.

She won't be able to help herself asking questions as they read, but she will at least try and limit her questions to things relevant to the apparent topic of the book, rather than for endless background details and context. She'll just try and figure that out from what she knows and what the text itself says.

The book is A Comparative Analysis of Stored Enchantments, by a Finn Tirmorgan.  He's comparing various methods of storing magic and setting it to be released, with different techniques and in different substances and with different levels of initial magic over different lengths of time and in different circumstances.  Crystals are usually best in isolation, but under these circumstances different metals can do better, which (even apart from cost) is why the spellwagon trails are usually not made out of crystal...

If Ira's careful, she can also learn a decent amount from this about how the magic flows through your wand, and how much you can influence it in different ways. 

Aeslin is usually taking careful notes, but every so often she flips through several pages looking for something else, or ignores the book for a minute to stare at her notebook.

After a while, she orders some egg pie, and keeps reading while eating with her other hand.

Is there much difference between, uh, stationary and moving magic? Going from what Aeslin said about the spellwagons, it sounds like they're as much about moving magic around as they about storing it in any given location. Maybe that's one of the circumstances that makes metal better for them.

Ira will definitely be paying close attention for anything that seems even potentially relevant to her actual practice of magic, and might occasionally ask Aeslin to turn back a page if she happens to flip while Ira is focused on something she think might have some personal applicability.

Overall, it's a reasonably productive study session, probably, certainly so by Ira's standards at least. Even if time is frozen in their worlds, though, it's not frozen for them, so even if they aren't doing a lot of physical work, time passing will eventually encourage one or both to get some sleep.

Oh, but you need to store magic in the metal (or occasionally crystal) tracks to keep the spellwagons moving.  You could store it in each wagon itself, but that's much less efficient because crystals and metals are heavy...

Aeslin usually doesn't mind turning back a page, though it sometimes takes her a moment to notice Ira's request when she's deep in thought.

Judging by how Aeslin is still avidly studying, and how she's ordered several more cups of tea, it might take a while for her to get to sleep unless Ira asks first...

Ira's energy is definitely flagging. "Aeslin, are you feeling tired at all? I think I might be just about ready to sleep. Learning about this fascinating but my eyes are tired enough that it's starting to be tricky to follow."

Aeslin starts, blinks, and looks up.  "Oh, uh -" She wipes her eyes, and glances back at her notebook.  "Yes, I've got a decent grasp of the theory now, or at least Tirmorgan's version of it.  And several ideas for me to test when I'm back home with the lab...

"But yes.  I can take a break and dream now.  Would you like me to come into your dreams?"

She takes another silver coin out of her pocket.  "Bar, two rooms for us, please?"

Two keys appear on the bar, with tags with (adjacent) room numbers and the message "Enjoy your stay!"

Ira smiles and nods, though with distinct sluggishness. "I'd certainly to give it a try. Can I ask...what it's like, if that's not too vague a question? And, do you need to know anything about what my dreams are usually like?"

Aeslin, not noticing Ira's sluggishness, smiles.  "It's fun!  I don't need to know anything about what your dreams are until I'm there - I'll see them when we're both asleep and I'm coming in.  I'll 'wake you up' in the dream to realize you're dreaming - people feel it's like waking up with a good memory of their dreams.  Except you're still in the dream, and you can change it around however you want, even easier than I can with my magic because it's your dream."

Ira nods. "Alright. I guess I'll...see you there?" She gets a contemplative look. "Where do dreams...We can talk about it in the dream, I guess. Good night Aeslin."

With that, Ira will grab her key (or, well, one of the two keys, whichever is closer), stand up, head to the room on the tag, complete the best approximation of her nightly routine possible with the available amenities, and then collapse into bed, falling asleep night-instantly.

There's a window in her room... or, well, it looks like a window... looking out on a moonlit winter forest with falling snow.  In the room itself, the walls are painted dark red and green.    There's a bathtub/shower with lots of hot water available and several types of soap if she wants, and a slider on the end of the bed to make her mattress exactly as firm or soft as she wants.

Aeslin spends a little while staring at the slider in her own room and trying to figure out exactly what it's changing, before deciding it's not going to be any good.  As she does half the time these days, after the spells to trigger her dreamwalking, she casts another spell on herself to actually put herself to sleep.  Otherwise, her mind would just keep racing far too long and she'd be tempted to turn back on the light and get a book out.

The fields of the dreamlands are weirder around here, away from Aeslin's home universe in the middle of a Bar she isn't even starting to understand.  If she looks too closely at any of the shrubbery or trees, they start to twist in front of her eyes, sort of vaguely reminiscent of the forest from Queen Elethy's dream of the Last War that one time.

Aeslin is excited, but also a bit disturbed.

She doesn't see anyone obviously next to her... but there's a trail, so she starts walking down it.

And then the trail bends around, and the tree in front of her is looking familiar and not shifting - not quite like her own dreams or her friends', but sort of like a cross between theirs and Queen Elethy's.  A moment later, she waves her own dream-wand...

The transition is smooth, perhaps even strangely so. Aeslin is standing at the edge between an area of sparse sylvan woodland and long rows of manicured trees, perhaps an orchard of some kind. On the horizon, tall mountains rise into the sky. The sun is high and unclouded, its heat balanced by a cool breeze. Across the maybe-orchard from her there's what looks like barn and farmhouse, with someone sitting out on the house's porch, though at this distance it's hard to distinguish anything visually.

It's beautiful.  It's almost like a dream of Aeslin's childhood; if she cared to change it she could probably stick in Svarendar's Academy in the distance...

... but she's not going to.  At least not yet.  She bounds toward the farmhouse, her dream-self starting to look younger as she goes.  "Hello, Ira!" she calls out.  "It's me, Aeslin!"

Ira, meanwhile, looks a bit older and gruffer, for a moment at least. She stands hurriedly and grabs a whistle hanging from a lanyard around her neck. "Stop where you are!" She shouts back, seemingly on the defensive, but as Aeslin resolves through the distance, her stance becomes relaxed and her appearance begins to shift back towards her waking form. "Oh, huh! Uh. Sorry about that Aeslin. So, this is a dream?"

"Yes!  This's beautiful!  Is this what your home looks like?"

Aeslin looks down at her own green plaid schoolgirl's dress, and the ribbons in her hair, and shrugs.

"Oh, this?" She briefly spins around, looking at the farmhouse, then back around towards Aeslin and the orchard behind her. "No, this looks almost totally different. This is...hm. I know that, uh, a moment ago, I knew that this was my-- the orchard this character of mine owns. I made her up for a doll-- we make dolls, for the hearth, I and uncle do, since the hearth like gifts that have personal meaning to us, and for me it's easiest to get invested in characters and stories and worlds that I make up. This place is one of those worlds, or, part of one anyway. I was thinking about it a lot when I stumbled into Milliways yesterday."

"It's beautiful!  And since it's a dream, you can change it around if you want!  Sometimes without even meaning to!  You don't even need any magic; just want to, since it's your dream.  Or I can too since I'm now in the dream too, say, if I think that barn windowsill should be another color..."

She snaps her fingers, and it's suddenly sky-blue.  She snaps them again, and it's back to white again.

"Wow! Hm..." Ira looks contemplative for a moment, then starts to lift off the ground, laughing delightfully as she does so. She drifts for a moment, then floats with more coherent intent towards Aeslin. "I've always wanted to fly. I know they had machines to do it, back in my mother's world, and in grandma's, but wishing for something like that's never been practical."

Aeslin concentrates for a moment, sprouts dragon-like wings from her shoulders, and joins Ira in the air.  After a moment, she chuckles.  "I haven't been flying in dreams since I was really this young.  Wow - I'd forgotten how fun it is."

Ira will happily fly around with Aeslin for a bit, shifting the environment with surprising ease and proficiency for someone who hasn't ever lucid-dreamed before, creating obstacle courses to fly through and grand vistas to gaze upon, conjuring fascinating sky-creatures of all sorts to fly alongside.

Aeslin adds in her own landscapes and eagles and griffons and - in the distance - one dragon, Svarendar.

After a while, she conjures a flying carpet of palm fronds for them to stretch out on in the air, and morphs her hair back to her waking hairstyle and gives her dress the Royal Research Mages' arms again.  "Maybe I'll do this more," she muses.  "I haven't ever gone dream-romping with Gwen; she'd probably like it...  I used to all the time with my sister and Branhal and Triganna; I even started teaching my sister how to dreamwalk, and I might've gotten her all the way there if I hadn't gone off to the Research Mages..."

"If it's anything like as fun for them as for me I'm sure they'll love it." Ira replies as she settles on the carpet next to Aeslin. "That reminds me. How does this," she gestures vaguely at the dreamscape as a whole, "work? Dreamwalking, and I guess dreams in general? There are some books back home about how brains work, including a little bit about how dreams work, but people didn't know much in either my mother's or grandma's worlds, and certainly they didn't know anything about magic."

"We don't know all that much about brains either..." Aeslin says dreamily.  "I was trying to learn about them in the context of golems; I know the Crystal Mountains know a lot more somehow --"

She suddenly realizes it still might not be best to talk about the Crystal Mountains, and stops herself.

"-- Somehow.  The magic of dreamwalking interacts with your mind and your magical life-web, and lets you project that beyond even your body to interact with other people's minds.  So most all the detail-work is done by your mind; we don't know how that interacts with the brain.  Queen Elethy developed the spells herself, from bits she'd learned before the Last War, but the brain's mostly a mystery to her too.  She wrote a book on it, and then turned her attention to more important matters... and then I guess Svarendar took one of the few copies of that book with him when he left to start his Academy, and I found it in the library there."

Aeslin pauses and then whispers, "So even if I somehow live forever like her... I still won't have the time to learn everything."

Ira immediately gets a thoughtful look, various thought-shapes half-forming and dissolving in her field of view as she considers something, before refocusing back on Aeslin. "You stopped talking about it pretty suddenly, and only mentioned a few times before, so it's alright if you can't say anything, but what can you tell me about the Crystal Mountains? I know you've said crystals are used to store magic, sometimes. Are the Crystal Mountains, like, mountain-sized magically saturated crystals?"

"Not fully... but there're a whole lot of crystals in the mountains.  After the Last War some of them had a lot of dangerous wild magic left, and who knows what other artifacts might've been there.  Maybe some of them still do - not many people have gone there recently, for fear of the wild magic.  Or, well, not that I know of..."

Aeslin shakes her head, eliding just about everything about the mysterious golemcrafters who said they were from the Crystal Mountains.  She and one of her friends had gotten involved with those golemcrafters, totally not realizing their real nefarious goals.  And then they'd vanished just as quickly as they'd come.  She - and the Queen - are still sure that the golemcrafters had found some lost arts from before the Last War somewhere.

"One of my friends went there a few years ago, around the same time I joined the Research Mages.  I haven't seen her since.  I hope she found the secrets she was looking for, without getting into any bad trouble."

Ira nods solemnly. "I'm sorry to hear that. I hope she turns up again, or that you're able to find her eventually."

Ira will sulk, just a moment, before cheering herself up a bit with more aerial play. Eventually she'll ask Aeslin another question. "So, could I practice magic in a dream? Or, would it not really be worth anything?"

Aeslin shakes her head, saying, "I'm too glum tonight," and joins Ira in the air again.

(Maybe she should spend more time thinking about things like this?  No, she's spending a whole lot of time thinking about a lot of other interesting things, like improving the spellwagons.)

"No," she answers, "practicing in dreams wouldn't be worth anything.  It's all dreams anyway, inside people's heads.  But it's fun!"

Aeslin conjures a wand for show, and sends a fountain of water at Ira.

Ira giggles, deflecting the water with burst of air before playfully retaliating with her own water-spurt. This may prompt an informal dream-battle.

Ira doesn't formulate anymore actual questions that night, though she will fall into deep thought and consideration for a moment, a few times.

Time is still passing, in Milliways at least, so eventually this has to come to an end. When she wakes up, though, Ira is feeling excellent. That was the best sleep she's had in a long while.

Aeslin wakes up too, smiling, and lies back in the soft Milliways bed, staring at the still-moonlit still-snowy woods seemingly outside.  This was the most fun she's had in a while - studying, and also teaching magic, and also just playing in dreams.

Milliways is a great place.  Wherever it might open the door next - whether to Ira's world to study the Hearth and maybe raise up some ancient Elves, or just back to the palace to try out her new ideas about spellwagons, or somewhere else entirely - she's so glad she came here.