"I mean, I'm not any better than you, that's exactly my point," he says. "We're all just—normal people doing normal things and then suddenly—" A wordless gesture of shock and dismay.

"Well, better or not, it's sure as hell a good thing we've got someone who hasn't traumatized her around," someone else mutters.

"No kidding," he says wryly.

"What do we do with her?" someone else wonders. "In the long term, I mean."

"...She might end up coming home with us," says Izaneth. "'Cause - we're the only people she really feels safe around right now, and I kind of really feel for her, you know?"

"Okay sure," he says. "But, like, in what capacity exactly, I don't know if normal refugee laws cover this."

"We'll figure something out."

"There's no precedent as such, but maybe it's time we made one," says Talyr.

"Well that's delightfully inspecific," someone says cynically.

"Do you have anything more helpful to say?" the demon next to him asks.

"...Not as such, no."

"Then maybe shut up."

"I have a cousin who's a lawyer and won't ask inconvenient questions if I ask him about weird edge cases in immigration and refuge law," someone offers.

"Thank you, that's actually helpful," the one who told the cynic to shut up says.

"That's a good start," Talyr agrees. "Thank you."

"...Um," someone else says. "Uh, I think I have a good idea of who you should check first."

"Oh?"

"So I was thinking about how maybe we really should of guessed because of how she looked at us and then it occurred to me that that wasn't the only weird thing?"

"What other weird thing—"

(There is a - shift, a sudden subtle vertigo, as though while you weren't looking the whole world slid a few inches to the left.)

—he blinks, momentarily misplacing his train of thought.

A lot of people are confused! There is general looking-around and expressions of puzzlement. "...That was odd," the one he was talking to says. "What was I saying again?"

And:

You wake with a start and a splash, in a ditch by the side of a road, neither of which you've ever seen before in your life. The air is mild, without the bite of early spring. The malevolent force of nature locked inside your heart and mind sleeps soundly, never stirring. You shouldn't touch it until you know what's going on. A mara is not a tool to use lightly.

Figures in the distance, unfamiliar, soaring unlike birds in the too-blue sky. This isn't the nightmare realm: the world is solid and real. And when you reach out, you feel no roiling nightmare darkness, no bitter flicker of possession, not even the faint whispering spark of another locked mara like yours. Whatever these people are, with their strange forms and their broad beautiful wings, they're no kind of dream-creature.

You almost can't believe it, when they land and one makes a crude remark in an indecipherable tongue. It just seems so... stupid. You try to explain about the mara, but you half know it's not going to work, and indeed it doesn't. He sees nothing in your eyes, because your mara is safely contained, and you're not about to call it up just to show him what it looks like. Odds are he wouldn't understand, and this is definitely not a safe situation in which to hold a mara in the grip of your bare will. It would not be worth it to call on your mara just to stop them from raping you.

They carry you off to a strange portal, which leads to a place that isn't the nightmare realm either, heaping another layer of incomprehensible foreignness onto the pile. And when the man who flew you here throws you onto a stone slab and rips your clothes off, then you finally bother to be afraid.

There is - a long blur of pain, its details mercifully obscured. The choice, made again and again and again and again and again, not to open the lock and draw on the mara's power, not to risk possession for a chance at safety and freedom. The degree to which you want these people dead varies, but outside of brief moments of hazy temptation you never want them trapped in an eternal nightmare, even though what they've trapped you in is arguably worse. Adding more suffering won't balance the scale of the world; it just drags everything farther down. And if they kill you then your mara will get loose anyway, but it's abundantly clear that they have no immediate plans to kill you.

You wish, variously, for death or rescue or a good night's sleep or two free hours to cry in; but more than anything else, you just wish you could ask them what the fuck they think they're doing—

The world untwists, and everyone is back in their own skin. (A subtle flavour in the air, a hint of unreality, suggests that they might not be all the way back.)

There is a moment of collective stunned silence before the room erupts into a roar.

Some people are panicking. Some of them are screaming accusations at one another. One or two seem to have gone into denial and are consequently yelling at her.

She steps into the room, wearing a simple white dress that blurs slightly at the edges.

The roar quiets; yelling just doesn't produce the kind of volume it should.

"I'm not going to murder you all," she says over their softened voices. "And I'm not going to lose control of my mara. I wouldn't have tried this if I thought it might fail that badly. I'm just here to talk."

This alarms and frustrates some people!

"...Okay," Jiorthkir says, "I'm listening."

"What, in fact, did you think you were doing?"

"...Well, I wasn't on that expedition and can't speak to the stupidity of the ones who were in not realizing something was up," he says cautiously, "but we thought you were human."

She raises her eyebrows. "I am."

"...No, humans come from the plane where we found you. You seem more like a human than like a demon or an angel," he says this word derisively, "so I guess whatever you're using to translate might have gotten confused."