"I'll come with you to Felix's dimension but I wasn't under the impression you thought we were innocent."

He makes a sort of a dismissive gesture. "That was an jab at your bosses to remark how low I think they're likely to sink. And not a threat."

"You know that saying threatening things and then saying they aren't threats doesn't really undo the threatenedness, right? But I'll come with you."

"I didn't even realize it would be taken as a threat. Innocent until proven guilty. But reasonable."

He stands up and goes over a nearby bush to break off a twig.

"Do you want to meet there or should I carry you?"

"Is it not feasible for me to walk?"

Shrug. "The only portals you could reach are either in Felix's hotel suite or in the red district. My plan was to use one of the portals that opens to the sky. The twig is meant to be set off on fire in case you're wondering."

"If it's all right with you I'll go through the portal in the hotel."

He shrugs. "I'll be waiting you then. Anything else before I take off?"

"I don't think so. Thank you."

He rolls his eyes. "You're welcome if in the future you need another catastrophic mess."

And then he takes flight.

She goes to the hotel and through the portal.

She is now standing at a terrace space. There are stone pillars on each corner, each with a large burning pyre. Everything is very intricately carved and pretty.

He is sitting on a stone bench looking at a pocket everything. "Hi, Isel. Do you mind if I close the portal?"

"Go ahead!"

He closes the portal.

"The red dreamshaper is not even one year old yet."

"Ah. Fantastic."

"His parents died in the altercation. Initially Felix thought it was the mom, but she lied... And a lot of the entire mess was because Felix couldn't even tell you what to expect. The mom thought you might kill even a clean child that wasn't controlled enough."

" - depends a lot on what the risks are. What we need is, like, a procedure to ensure no horrible monsters escape from pocket dimensions and a way of verifying that the procedure is being followed. The kid - you can build floating islands on the ocean, right, send him waaaay far away from everything and give us some way to verify the bounds of his dimension are all way far away from everything and that should do until he's old enough we can explain things to him."

"Felix can build the islands. I don't think I am a dreamshaper. Being physically away should help some, but not completely. We don't know if his dimension willl have horrible monsters, because of the mother's lie and your government pushing things Felix didn't even had the chance to talk to the kid about it. What Felix observed is that the pocket dimension is like, a muddy flat with birds stuck on the ground. And it might just be that. But the only person that can tell us that for sure is the kid. Which, is not one yet and lost his parents."

"How hard is that kind of thing to tell?"

"Figuring out if things are not magic isn't that hard. It would mostly involve comparing things, like, we ask the kid if making a bird takes the same amount of magic to make an amount of mud. If there is a big difference then the bird might be magical in some way. Or maybe the mud is magical. And then we see if it can metaphorically look closer at what the magic is doing. It's also possible that the kid could learn to push his magic on other directions. Felix had vague hopes he could bribe you into letting the kid live if the kid could produce a way to let people add 125 years to their lifespan."

"Is the kid uniquely able to do that?"

"Not uniquely. The fact that birds are a central theme makes it promising, but not at all certain. Felix might've tried to sell the idea that he is planning for a very limited number of dreamshapers, so even the red one is valuable."

"Maybe when he's older. In the meantime we need to verify he hasn't touched anything. Can you think of a way to give us the resources to verify that?"

"I really doubt he set foot on his pocket dimension much less used it to walk around anywhere. Felix can use dreamshaping to create arbitrary footage of past events regardless if there was an actual camera there. But it's easier if there was a camera at all and he can recover destroyed footage."

"Part of the problem is we don't want to rely on Felix because if there were a problem no one is confident he'd hand over the footage."