There's nobody here but the staff; if they take a booth opposite the counter they'll be difficult to overhear. The King talks in a voice that doesn't carry.

"The first thing to know about the dreamrealm is that space and time are weird. I know we said that already, but it bears repeating. Some nights you'll be in there for five minutes, some nights for five hours. There are tales of people getting woken up in the middle of the night, going back to sleep, and running into their own past selves, and I don't exactly believe them but I'm less sure than I'd like. It's shaped like a big corridor with one end pointing towards Earth and the other towards where the dreamwyrms come from, but two groups can go back and forth all night and never run into each other. How far you can see varies from moment to moment, and so does how far a step will take you. You'll learn to recognize fast ground and slow ground, but for your first several months all you'll need to do is stick by your squad leader. With me so far?"

"I... think so? It's useful information that I think I can remember, but also I have no idea how to imagine it at all."

"I would love to say it will all make sense when you see it," says Malcolm with a rueful smile, "but it won't."

"It will make a little bit more sense every time, though," says the Queen. "Anyway, the next thing to know is how to fight. You can't bring things into the dreamrealm, so everything revolves around being able to shape the raw material of the place into a useful form, and the better you know that form and the more deeply associated with it you are, the more powerful your creation will be. The most straightforward example is a sword. I fence: in the waking world I wield my rapier and learn to think of it as a dangerous weapon. In the dreamrealm, my thoughts create a killing blade and my mind knows how to use it. Many people, especially when they're starting out, fight with a sword or a spear or a bow."

"Or a ballista," grins Malcolm. "When there's a really big one."

"It does sound like that sort of place." They return Malcolm's wry smile. "But at least it has swords! I suppose I'll find out if I'm familiar enough with mine yet." Or if they will be after they go out to whack a tree with it for another hour or two this evening, just in case.

"You and ballistas!" they grin back. "I don't think I could keep an entire one of those in my head, but I expect I'll be very glad someone can."

"Oh, they're absolutely a team effort. If they weren't they'd only be as powerful as arrows--the amount of damage an attack does depends on how much will is going into it and how focused it is."

"Just so. But setting that aside: there are ways to fight that don't rely on traditional weapons. The activities sometimes called 'the peaceful arts' need not be peaceful, in the dreamrealm. Artisans can turn the stuff of dreams into any material they understand well enough, and use it to do what I can only call casting spells. It's far more abstract and harder to explain than melee combat, but I've seen an embroidery Laurel take down half a dozen dreamwyrms in a single strike. On the nights Malcolm isn't crewing a ballista, he's a combat weaver."

Will and focus and abstract understanding... They wonder if they'll do better at melee or at craft-magic, and what features determine that, but really there's no point in asking, they'll just have to try both and see. They wonder if one can do magic with bare math. Probably not, for whatever reason, or else half of their terminally nerdy friends would already be doing it.

"Call him a battle weaver and it'll sound like one of those Norse poetry phrases. What a thing to exist!"

A moment of wonder, then a moment of thought. "What do the Pelicans do, then? Coordinate all the rest of us?"

That gets a chuckle from the Queen. "You're not wrong. Most folks pick up some kind of offensive option, but there are also scouts, people who know enough people well enough that they can get separated from everyone else, find where the fighting is, and then call the rest of us to them. They also find anyone who gets caught in a patch of slow ground and separated accidentally. You don't want that to happen, but if it does, focus on the night's head scout and keep moving until they find you."

"I've seen some cooks use it for healing," adds the King. "If you take a hit and someone shoves a piece of bread in your hand, eat it."

"Eat food, got it, I can do that." Probably. Hmm. "Does it... taste like bread? Does any of this feel like anything normal?"

The Queen rests her chin on her hand, thinking. "The healing food tastes like--if there was food that was so good and so healthy that it healed you. Getting bitten by a dreamwyrm feels like the worst thing ever. Casting spells feels like--it's been too long since I've done it. Malcolm?"

"Ah, hmm, geez. You shape the dream stuff into a loom and threads and get into the zone--time gets really bent when you're casting, weaving a spell takes as long as swinging a sword from the perspective of the overall battle but sometimes it's twenty minutes for the person doing it. It's like a cross between a TTRPG action economy and real life. Anyway, you do the thing with the threads and mentally tie it to the effect you want to achieve, and if you execute the one correctly the other goes off. Some people have a specific pattern for each thing they want to do, one for damage and one for entangling-snare and so on. Some people just do whatever their current project that they're working on while they're awake is. IDK if that answered your question or not."

"Kind of! And some other questions I didn't have time to have yet. You're really standing there doing things with a loom, rather than some more abstract mental action I was imagining, wow! But I'm glad food tastes like food and pain feels like pain, not something weird and incomprehensible."

"Yeah, dreamwalkers have basically all the same senses, just getting unusual inputs. That's all I can think of for useful details, but I haven't been doing this very long as things go . . . ?"

"You have enough information at this point that I confidently expect you to wake up in the dreamrealm tonight," says the king. "But I should repeat a few more times how important it is not to get separated from everyone else. Bringing down all but the smallest dreamwyrms is a job for a team, and while they're not clever enough to try to lure you off on your own, it's very easy to pursue a wounded one straight into a pack of them. So don't. Stay in formation. If your squad leader says chase, chase; if they say hold fast, hold; if they say retreat, retreat. We fight on their turf, but they can't coordinate like we can, and that's our biggest advantage. Never forget that."

"Yes, Your Majesty." It's very good to have someone who can confidently tell you what the right things to do are. And to have already gotten practice doing the right things with the same people. The SCA seems like such a good setup for all this! (Although it should really do something about the problem where "hold" means two different things - but that conversation has already been had a dozen times.)

Helis has never been one of the people who go off to do their own thing in melee; they have sometimes been one of the people who fail to follow orders because they didn't hear them or were too distracted or weren't sure what to do, but it sounds like this might actually be easier in the dreamworld, with how you can feel where your people are? Well, they'll find out, and do their best to adapt to however things work, and try not to die. It's all starting to feel real, finally.

They take a moment to get used to the feeling, and to eat some of their food, which they've completely forgotten about until now.

Do they have other questions? "How do I tell who in the SCA does this, and who said they didn't want to know the secret, and who knows the secret but didn't want to get involved?"

"Everyone gets the option when they get their AoA, and about two thirds take it right off. Some of the ones who refuse get more and more curious until they change their minds. Anyone you see in the dreamrealm fights with us, of course. Royalty practically always fight--if someone who doesn't signs up for Crown Tourney with a consort who also doesn't, past royalty tell them horror stories of how much work it is until they're demoralized and then the MOLs match them against somebody really good in the first round. If they win anyway, the previous royals stay in charge of the dream army until there's a prince and princess. There are arguments about whether peerages in general or the Chiv in particular should be restricted to dreamwalkers but in practice they aren't. If you're meeting someone from another group and want to know if they're a dreamwalkes, the traditional thing is to say, "Did I see you in the Walmart yesterday?" and if they say "Maybe, I was wearing a green jacket and buying tomato paste" that means they're a dreamwalker. In practice you'll basically never need to do that, but why pass up a perfect excuse to have a secret password?"

"Okay that's hilarious. What a conspiracy though... But yeah, if you started restricting things to dreamwalkers in an obvious manner you'd have a way more obvious conspiracy and I don't think it'd really go well. Although now I bet half of the polling order gatekeeping arguments are secretly about that, huh..." Helis shakes their head. "Hopefully I can continue making those not be my problem."

"So every time someone you know gets their AoA you get a cliffhanger until you find out what they said? Yet another reason to try to show up tonight and not make people wait to find out. I bet it feels so weird when someone says no, though..."

Malcolm doesn't have a GoA and would be shocked to get one any time in the next five years minimum; he raises his water glass in a loose approximation of a toast. "Here's to not caring about polling order gatekeeping arguments!"

The Queen is a MoD and a Fleur in addition to being the Queen; she smiles wistfully at the innocence of youth. "It is always a reason for happiness when someone chooses to join our cause. It's convenient that you were the only person who got their AoA today; when we give out more than two or three in the same court we tell them spread over a few days so everyone can have plenty of help their first night."

Helis joins the toast with a grin, although to be honest half of their brain always assumes Malcolm has half a dozen more awards than he really does - he got them into this hobby and so he always feels like he's surely been here forever and done all the things he's interested in doing.

Ah, great to know they're going to be useless enough to need the entire group's help their first night. The Queen is so diplomatic in pointing these things out! Helis admires her greatly, and also feels like they're getting to the limits of their ability to not be embarrassing in front of royalty for one day.

"And so you have the time to talk to all of them individually, I bet. You do so much work!"  They were already doing so much work, and now there's a whole other layer of secret work on top of that, oof.

"This is our second reign; we wouldn't have signed up for it if we didn't think we could handle it. But it certainly helps that we can get a good night's sleep at the same time!"

The King chimes in with, "Everyone fights with their royals their first night, because the same resonance that makes us easy to find makes us harder to lose track of. So we want to take the chance to teach every new person one on one, and help you figure out what you're good at and figure out where you'll best fit into the order of battle. If you haven't been to a big war before, you might not have a sense for what it means when a majority of Æthelmearc is in something resembling the same place at the same time. Do you have a guess yet about whether you'll prefer to start with the sword or an art form? You'll have plenty of opportunities to try different things."

Oh wow, it's just going to be everyone in one place? They had been imagining smaller groups than that. "I've been to melees with a couple hundred people, but I think we have... more people than that..." Yeah, that's Helis's intimidated face. They missed even seeing the Pennsic war, because it was too hot to live that week. (Hopefully it's not horribly hot in the dreamlands, right? It seems like that shouldn't be a thing!)

"I'd feel better with a sword, but I don't know whether that's the deciding factor, or whether I'd be more effective with something I'm less excited about but more skilled at." Not that they're not excited about crafts, but in a way that doesn't seem like it'd carry over that well to battle spellcasting. Presumably battle spellcasting doesn't result in shiny new things to wear, and most of the joy of crafting is in making something you like that, you know, continues to exist. But who knows if they live in a world convenient enough that joy is relevant to what the best role for them is.

The Queen nods. "My advice is: if you feel like a warrior who makes art sometimes, use the blade. If you feel like an artisan who fights sometimes, use your art."

They smile tentatively. "Well, a warrior who makes art a lot, but if we're talking about-- personal identity rather than habits, then yes, the blade it is."

Malcolm: "When I'm awake I scribe more than I weave, because courts ask for scrolls and nobody asks for trim. But weaving is what comes naturally, so it's easier to build spells into."

They nod. "Makes sense that it'd work that way."

"Although it's also... How do I even say this sensibly..." They don't think they can. It's late and so many things have happened today. They keep talking anyway. "...It's so good? Everything works the way that makes me happy. I don't know that I'm going anywhere with this, just, isn't it weird?" Yeah, acting embarrassing in front of royalty, there it is.

"As extradimensional monster invasions go it's honestly pretty rad," says Malcolm, who then also looks embarrassed about having said this. 

"Some people say the dreamrealm has been shaped by human minds over the millennia to work the way it does," adds the Queen, "but of course that raises additional questions and doesn't explain the dreamwyrms."

Helis is so incredibly glad Malcolm is here.

And then the Queen entirely understandably responds to the thing they said, and... "Oh god, now I'm-- no, I think I should take at least a week before starting to worry about whether my unconscious desires do actually explain the dreamwyrms." They really might. And probably there are nonzero other people who are like this. No, seriously, no thinking about this right now. "I'm sorry, Your Majesties, I'm emotionally scrambled and I should just really stop talking, unless there's anything else that needs figuring out before tonight. I promise I'll be much better once there are actual things to do."

And to Malcolm: "You I'm not apologizing to, you voluntarily talk to me and you're not allowed to stop now."

And now they're going to eat their food and try not to think about confusing things until someone tells them what to do next.

Malcom laughs, friendly and cheerful, and polishes off the rest of his burrito bowl. And then it's time for everyone to be getting home and, well, going to bed.