"Can you say more things about how you would try to get me home?"

"I would write down a bunch of runes that might have related meanings, do my selective antimagic at it real hard, and tell the diagram to send you home, pretty much."

"If something went wrong with that, what might it be?"

"Whatever brought you here when I wasn't trying to cast anything, which is mysterious as heck to me, might act up again, and if I didn't draw the diagram big enough I guess it's possible I could send you partway but not all the way."

She considers this.

"If you sent me partway but not all the way to a different place in the ordinary way of places, then I would end up at some place in between the place where I started and the place where you meant to send me. I do not at all know what happens if you send me partway but not all the way between Pyrrhia and Not Pyrrhia. But," she says, sounding a little doubtful, "it's possible I could see it in the future, if you were going to try it?"

"How does that work, how strongly do I have to be going to try it?"

"I'm not at all sure. I'm supposed to have seer lessons but I haven't learned very much from them because I haven't been to any yet."

"Does that interfere much, considering? I can start drawing the diagram, if that helps."

"It makes it much harder to focus on lessons and I am not a dragonet who needs any more help not focusing on my lessons. Let's see what happens if you draw the diagram."

So May clears a large space - she doesn't have paper quite as big as this might need - and starts drawing runes.

Whiteout stays very carefully out of her working area but peers very curiously into it.

Bunches of lines in a big rectangle!

"It's so extremely orderly," she says, fascinated.

"Were you expecting something else?"

"I don't think I was expecting. But it so very isn't the way drawing normally works. I've filled many a page with the colours my eyes saw, and that's hard, but I think drawing a shape the way the page sees it might be even harder."

"What do you mean the way the page sees it?"

"Instead of the way your eyes do. Your eyes see the lines tilted and skewed, but the page they're drawn on sees them just how they're laid out, all at once without the distortion of distance."

"I'm not sure I get it. Would you say I'm drawing this as the page - well, the ground - sees it?"

"Yes! You're putting it on the ground the way it lies on the page, not the way it looks if you stand over it."

"I guess it is very geometrical that way. I'm not used to thinking of the things as different - I suppose our vision might be really different."

"You still have two eyes close to each other, right? So you see the world the way it looks from the front of your head. Things that are farther away look smaller, and things that are tilted look squished. Unless they don't, I suppose."

"Yes - well, the first thing, I'm not sure I'd say 'squished' about tilted things." Rune rune rune. Check check check.

"When you tilt something away from you it squishes, doesn't it? So that if you draw it you have to draw the tilted part shorter than you would if you were paper underneath it and could see it all proper."

"It distorts, yes."

"What isn't squished about them?"