A barefoot man with no eyes walks in and is immediately perplexed by the flooring. He pauses to examine it and then, still confused, signs, "Lia? You around?"

Griffie has interacted with one (1) deafblind humanoid, namely a temporarily cursed party member who was, conveniently, wearing a ring so ey could receive communication over the message spell telepathically. It would be incredibly invasive and presumed-hostile to put a magic ring on someone without talking to them, and also somewhat expensive in that their telemessage ring is also their Ring of Sustenance, and it would actually also constitute touching them. Might as well try tactile sign, it's not actually less weird.

Someone is signing against Val's hand. It feels strange but is nonetheless easy to parse. Their hand is much smaller than that of an adult human, no real fingernails, what feels like clipped spines on it, is unusually cool to the touch, and has a waxy texture. "Lia is not around. I am a stranger to you and you are at a magic bar who is a person and takes doors."

"...What. How did I get into a magic bar?"

The hand is not really warming up even on extended contact with Val's, though it's not draining much heat either.

"Sometimes, when a person goes through a door, instead of going where they would expect to go, they go to a magic bar named Milliways. Time in the place you are from does not usually pass while you are in Milliways, as long as you plan to go back. If your door is in a safe location, you can hold it and invite your friends to visit, too. There is an infirmary staffed adequately to heal acute injuries people enter with and a security office staffed adequately to prevent violence in the main bar area, where we are."

"...Would you say this is an entire universe too small to fit a planet maintained by an inhuman power against the encroaching tide of nonexistence and populated by refugees from the lost world, and would you say it's friendly?"

"I would say she's friendly and this is a small universe of unclear size. You could probably evacuate people into it as quickly as you could walk them through the door if you could rent rooms for them to stay in, but the rooms aren't free. If you're considering it you should probably invite more people in to talk to her if it's safe. Usually when refugees come through here they try to find people who will let them follow into their universes." A pause. "You can't come to mine, mine is a mess that is about to explode when I open my door."

"Mine is stable, it's just small and alone and there aren't enough people to know all the things we'd need to know to maintain the kind of tech we could maintain if we had more people. - Well, it's not stable, really, but it's in an equilibrium. You hoping for a place to move?"

"No, planning to accumulate power and resources and go violently rescue it. I'm unaging and I work at the infirmary here, so I have a while. Want me to show you to Bar so you can take a seat and talk to her? She might start having floor markings for you eventually but probably not while we're standing on it. She usually talks with spontaneously appearing napkins, she can almost certainly do texture instead of color writing."

"She can write? The magic thing that maintains the universe? Can write things and you can read them? Is that related to why we can understand each other?"

"We can understand each other thanks to a language effect of hers. And yes, she can write things and I can read them. She also sells books and species-appropriate food and drink and maintains an atmosphere both of us can breathe even though the gases I breathe are inert to most people. She isn't the sole maintainer, she says she works for someone else and they operate the door, but they can't be found or contacted and she can."

"Huh. Books would be very nice, I can go bring some to trade if that's the done thing here."

"If you leave and don't have someone else from your world hold the door, then when you come back it will be a normal door. So when you open your door, you should probably call someone over. If that's hard I can play some probably-strange music very loudly with a tool through your door? The bar has copies of almost all published books. She'll take anything of market value – some worlds use rare metals, some worlds use fiat currency, some do something more exotic, and some people pay in various forms of barter. If you want barter to personally appeal to her, she's a fan of beverages and recreational intoxicants? Doesn't consume them herself that I know of, though.

"Thanks. I think I'll take you up on that - uh, if I have you help summon the government, is it going to be a problem that they can see, or for that matter that they're the government?"

“Both of those sound convenient. I can also see.”

"Is everything here except the mysterious imperceptible door entity safe to look at, then? And hear and touch and smell and so on?"

"Everything here is safe to use senses on right now. Is your world not like that? My world has parts that are not like that but it's rare. Sometimes there are people who do not want to be touched, or who do not want their possessions touched, and might react badly, but right now it's just me and Bar."

"Yeah, there's - I don't know what you can sense - you don't want to see the magic but it's inside the mountains, you can't get to it without someone warning you, and in general humans can't hear it from here, but if you can that would be bad."

"I have some exotic senses but they go out to 60 feet. Are the mountains more than 60 feet away? I have better hearing than the average human, I don't know how I am compared to the best human. I can wear earplugs just in case."

"The mountains are farther than that but a mage who's carrying magic around might come that close, or someone might use magic that close. Humans do usually need to be touching a mage to notice anything but you haven't said what your extra senses are."

"I can sense some spirits and souls out to 60 feet, though a lot of worlds have spirits and souls incompatible with it."

"That's the kind of thing that might be a problem. It might also not be, and it's sometimes possible to notice that you're perceiving the magic too clearly before it's too late but you do need very good reflexes if you're going to rely on that and I don't know how quickly you'd go mad from some sense I've never heard of before. But it's completely possible there's no problem for any of several reasons. Do you happen to be backed up?"

"No. But I can borrow a tool from Bar for you to play music with if you press a button, then wait in the bathroom until you call me over? Or Bar can send messages to my computing tablet and I can go even further away. If you walk while touching the wall to the right of the door, the wall and floor will start being large square ceramic tile instead of wood, the wall will make some turns, and then you're in the bathroom."

"That sounds like a good idea. And I suppose it'd be silly to ask you whether the music is safe, if you didn't think so you wouldn't offer, and it's not like you needed my informed cooperation at all. - Unrelatedly, are you or Bar selling blueprints for computing tablets?"

"Bar sells blueprints for lots of computing machines, but tablets like mine have so many fancy tiny parts that they take lots of factories to make. Bar can likely recommend you a better starting point than this. The music should be safe, does a simple pattern of a few pure tones seem safe to you?"

"I assume so? I wouldn't really know. I don't even know what makes a tone pure. I didn't even know there were such things as impure tones until you implied it just now."