"How careful do I need to be about grabbing your fur?"

"Not terribly. Try not to yank on it, but I won't begrudge accidents while you're learning."

She nods and attempts to climb the bear.

The bear turns out to be easily climbable! And, when climbed, pretty easily sittable too.

"You can hang onto the fur over my shoulders if you feel in danger of slipping off," she says. "All set?"

Grab. "Yes, thank you."

"Off we go, then."

The flyers take off, Starlight in the lead, Snowfall clinging to Ebb, Charm following, Reflect bringing up the rear with wheelchair in hand. Button lopes after them. Her gait is very comfortable and does not present any imminent danger of ejecting her passenger.

There's - something about this place, an impression more easily clarified now that she's seen a little more of it. It seems... sharp, vivid, clear, unnaturally beautiful and at the same time utterly natural, like if 'reality' is a characteristic that comes in amounts, this place has more of it than Earth by a generous margin. Hard to see it when everything's dark like this, but the more her eyes adjust and the more of the landscape passes by, the more obvious it becomes.

Weird. It's like everything is a really sharp well-composed photograph or she's looking at it through a lens or something.

Yes, exactly like that.

It does bring a nice extra aesthetic touch to this trip over moonlit hills on the back of a polar bear.

"It's really pretty here."

"Isn't it?" agrees Charm, dropping down into chatting range. "Wait'll you see Silver Falls. Most beautiful thing I've ever seen, the waterfall and the Queen's palace - I've only been once but it was a very memorable once."

"I bet it's great. Did it take a long time to learn to fly on - made wings?"

"It wasn't so bad! Spider-gifts are nice like that. Maybe a week from the first time I put them on until I could keep up with the squad on 'em? A little longer before I was maneuvering like a real flyer."

"That is awesome. There are ways at home for humans to fly but they're all really cumbersome and most of them are either dangerous or not properly fun at all."

"Well, flying with these is no picnic if you get it wrong, but if you're sensible about it you can learn without getting in much trouble. I could, anyway. Flying's easier for smaller creatures, we don't fall so hard."

"That makes sense."

"Why, d'you want a set yourself?"

"Maybe!"

"Snowfall liked making mine, if she gets to know you maybe she'll offer." Flap flap. There does not really seem to be enough solid substance in those wings for them to work - strands of barely-visible spiderweb bind together a skeletal array of feathers haloed by a soft silver glow - but nevertheless they are demonstrably functional. "Hungry yet? What do your folk eat?"

"Humans eat lots of things. So far none of the same species that are people here are things I eat, fortunately, I feel like that would be awkward. Bread and broccoli and cheese and rice and chocolate and potatoes and cabbage and apples and strawberries and certain species of mushrooms I could not confidently identify in the wild and eggs and a whole bunch of stuff."

"Sounds about like the commonest sorts of fey, then, that's good. If you'd said you subsist exclusively on figs or something we'd have been in trouble."

"I'm not sure I have ever eaten a fig, although they are edible to humans!"

Charm giggles. "I had one once. You can get them down by the borderlands. It'd be a real trick to find one this far north."

"I know nothing about the Earthly growing climates of figs but that seems reasonable enough. About how much area is this world?"

"Good question. You could ask our geography expert, next break."

"How long a trip are we looking at?"