A person appears out of nowhere.

She appears to be sleeping, curled up and wrapped in a blanket.

There is - something going on with her, magically speaking. It is an unsettling sort of something. Subtle, dormant, immensely powerful.

Um.

What the heck.

She squints at her.

The ominous presence does absolutely nothing.

The girl blinks awake with a disgruntled mumble, sees Kaede, and squints right back.

"...er. Hi?"

She says something in a totally unfamiliar language.

...Kaede tries two other languages.

Nope. And nope. She frowns slightly.

She starts saying a lot of things in the first language—almost reciting them.

The strange girl watches her in mild puzzlement.

She does a 'wait' gesture with her hand and continues talking to herself.

Okay. She waits.

After about a minute and a half of this—

Hello, are you getting this?

She frowns, puzzled and concerned.

...okay you're getting this, did I mess the spell up, is this nonsense, you should be able to understand me -

She stares intently into Kaede's eyes. Whatever she's looking for there, she doesn't find it.

—how are you doing this? she asks at last.

...magic? Arcanism. It's a spell I designed a while ago—I can stop if it upsets you, we'd just have to learn each other's language -

...that is not... how magic... works.

Blink.

It... kinda is. Although you just appeared here out of nowhere speaking a language that doesn't exist so you possibly have different magic.

"This isn't a dream..." she murmurs to herself, sending the translation at the same time.

"Is it safe, the magic you're doing?"

Oh good idea, she does the same.

"It's safe in the same sense talking is safe? It can't get anything from your head that you don't choose to send, it can't control your actions, it can't directly physically or mentally harm you..."

"...is this place safe?" she asks next.

"It's probably not going to collapse on us anytime soon..."

"I could give you my language and learn yours if I shared a dream with you, but it's not completely safe to do that. I wouldn't do it if something might distract me while we were dreaming."

"It's... very unlikely that anything at all will distract you while you're dreaming here. Would you like to explain a bit more about that?"

"...I have a mara. It's locked now, which is safe unless I die. To use it, I have to unlock it, and if I'm under significant stress while it's unlocked - a fight, anything that shakes my concentration - then it could get loose entirely. That would be bad. But if I am in a strange place with strange magic I know nothing about and where no one knows what a mara is, it is very important that I have a way to communicate with people."