The ground beneath her dissolves into a swirling void that reaches for her with vaporous arms and pulls her down.

She falls for a timeless interval through the void, and then lands in a grassy field on a soft patch of springy moss.

She lets out a strangled scream that dies in her throat when she's landed on the moss. She looks around.

She is in a field. There is a beautiful sunset just getting underway in one corner of the sky, and in most directions the field seems to give way to woods a long way off, but opposite the sunset there is instead a little stream emerging from some woods that are much closer by.

Everything seems... slightly too real. The grass in the field is all perfectly natural grass, growing every which way - but it always seems to grow the right way, coming together in aesthetically pleasing swirls, and the shades of green involved are just a little too vivid, and the water in the stream sparkles a little too brightly, and the clouds veiling the descending sun glow too beautifully.

Uh... huh.

"Is anyone here?"

No. No one is here. Just the stream and the grass and the trees and the sunset.

...okay. Creepy hallucination. Alright. Stream and woods it is. She gets up, dusts herself, and starts walking.

As the sun sets, golden flowers open on climbing vines strung between the trees. The flowers begin to glow, softly at first, then like beautiful little streetlights.

Oooh pretty hallucination. She walks up to some vines.

The vines are so pretty. Big glowing gold flowers.

She'll keep walking, then, taking in all the pretty around her.

Everything is beautiful and rich in detail and just slightly otherworldly. Most of the trees and shrubs are recognizable or at least not-obviously-strange species, but the glowflowers are definitely nothing she's heard of, and there are a few other things like that, trees with spiral-shaped leaves or moss that sparkles as though dusted with gold.

It takes about an hour and a half to cross the forest, following streams and glowflowers the whole way. When she emerges from the other side, she is at the bottom of a gently sloping field that leads up to a charming little town, very Disney-picturesque, with dim glowflower streetlights in a rainbow of colours. Up on a hill in the middle of town is a golden palace, all tall towers and sunburst-themed decor, which gleams softly in the many-coloured light from below.

...well, then. She probably hit her head harder than she'd thought. She starts walking that way.

It's a pleasant evening, but there aren't many people wandering the outskirts of town. In fact the only one is -

- that's a tiger. A large, fluffy white tiger, wearing a gold-trimmed white sash neatly tied around her neck and fastened with a brooch or pin in the shape of a golden sunburst. She looks in Sadde's direction and pauses.

"Good evening," she says. "Are you in need of assistance?"

"Good evening. Yes. I, erm, seem to be rather thoroughly lost."

She nods. A nodding tiger is a slightly odd-looking sight.

"Where were you expecting to be, and how did you come to be here instead?"

"I was expecting to be on the way to school and then a creepy void swallowed me."

"It sounds like you might be an outworlder. The King will want to speak to you tomorrow, if so."

What a convenient hallucination. "Um, may I ask why?"

"I assume he has a good reason. He generally does."

"...I suppose that's a good characteristic for a king to have."

"Yes," the tiger agrees. "I wouldn't have been nearly so eager to join the Royal Guard otherwise."

She nods, slowly. "I'm Sadde, by the way."

"And I am Stormcloud. Pleased to meet you. Will you be needing a place to stay?"

"Well, probably, unless there's magic that lets me go without sleep and food."

"Not to my knowledge," says Stormcloud, amused. "I could find you a room at my friend's inn, if that's agreeable."

"It is. I—might also need a change of clothes? I also don't have any local currency.—I also speak your language, how's that work?"

"I've heard it's always possible to understand and be understood by an outworlder, but I never expected to meet one so I'm short on details," she says. "Of course no one will expect you to pay for things if you're not collecting a citizen's stipend."

"Citizen's stipend?"

"Yes - do they not have one of those in your world?"

"Er, I'm not sure what a citizen's stipend is and whether it'd be named the same—and presumably this is a country thing not a world thing here? There are hundreds of countries on my planet."

"Everyone in the Kingdom of Day receives a monthly citizen's stipend of enough money to comfortably live on," Stormcloud explains. "Because otherwise everyone would have to work just to house and clothe and feed themselves and that would hardly be fair. I've heard they don't have anything like it in the Kingdom of Night, but I wouldn't know the details. Hundreds of countries, really? The place must be enormous. Or the countries very small."

"Well, I think the official count is one hundred ninety-something. How many countries are there here? And how big is this place?"

"There are two. And, let me see... edge to edge across the borderlands, uninterrupted, I'd expect a fey of your size could walk the whole width of the circle in a hundred and twenty days."

"'Edge'?"

"...yes?"

"Er, is this not a spherical planet?"

"—I'd say 'of course not' but clearly that's not a matter of course. The world is circular, and has an edge. Is yours a sphere? How does that... work?"

"My world has a basic principle that everything attracts everything else, proportionally to how much stuff there is and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between things. That force is pretty weak but for sufficient amounts of stuff can be strong enough to, like—be gravity. And since it's the same in all directions everything that's big and massive enough ends up becoming a sphere, and that's my planet. So down points inwards."

"...that sounds strange," she says. "But I suppose it works for you."

"How's it work here?"

"Down points, ah, down, and the world is a circle of land and ocean under a dome of sky. It's possible to go out past the edge but not possible to come back afterward, so we don't know what's out there but we assume it's very dangerous."

"...I think I like my world's rules more."

"Perhaps the King will be able to help you return home."

"Maybe he will, but I kinda like it here. Everything's—more."

"What do you mean?"

"It's—difficult to explain. The colours are more colourful and the edges are sharper and the shadows look more like proper shadows—it feels sorta like I used to live in a painting, and a very good and realistic one, but now I just stepped out of it into the real world."

"Oh. Well, I'm glad you're enjoying it here." She starts leading Sadde into the city.

Follow follow. "So, what's this world like?"

"Well, what do you mean?"

"I mean—you were talking about country size, if your whole world is like you said my planet is way, way bigger, and I was wondering how you'd describe its basics? Like what the two countries are like, what the King's like, are there political subdivisions, what sapient species are there here—we only have humans—"

"I don't know very much about the Kingdom of Night, but I know they do things differently there. I'm not sure what you mean by political subdivision. There's all sorts of folk; most people you meet in the Kingdom of Day will be corvid or feline or ungulate or fey, although there's other kinds of bird-folk too, the corvids are just commonest."

"I mean—cities? Do you have, like, people who are not the King but also rule places?"

"Towns have mayors and so on, if that's what you mean."

"Yeah, that's what I mean."

"Well, there you are then."

"You mentioned outworlders are always understood. So this has happened before?"

"Yes, long before my time."

"Do you know anything about where they're from?—I'm sorry, am I being very rude, should I be asking someone else these questions?"

"I may not always be able to answer you but I'm not offended to be asked," she says. "I don't know anything about where outworlders come from besides 'outside of the world'."

She nods. "Does this world have any magic?"

"Yes, of course," she says, slightly surprised. "Doesn't yours?"

"Nnnooo, not at all, my world has a set of mathematical rules that everything ever follows and nothing beyond that."

"I can't begin to imagine what that would be like."

"Not knowing what magic you have, I can't really compare, but you'd be surprised how much stuff we can accomplish with just maths."

"I suppose. It still seems very strange."

"I won't say it's strange that you do, it's downright expected, the world being flat and all."

"Is that the sort of thing that leads you to expect magic? Well, it does seem like it would lead you to expect something other than your very own mathematical laws."

"It's, hmm... Yes, at least that, but there's also certain kinds of things that point to 'complex enough mathematical laws they might well be magic' and a flat world surrounded by a dome of sky is one of them."

"I haven't ever considered what mathematical laws the world would follow if it had those. It almost doesn't make sense as a question. The world is the world; it needn't answer to our descriptions of it."

"Yeah, that's more or less what I mean by this being very suggestive of magic."

Up ahead, there is an inn with a colourful woven basket hanging above the door. A pearly-white unicorn is just leaving as they approach.

"That's my friend's inn," says Stormcloud, indicating it with a wave of a large white paw.

In she goes, pun intended!