"Not sure," says Amariah. "I mean, Sherlock found the door once and I haven't found it myself before and neither have you, so he's the most likely to find it again but we don't have a good idea of frequency; we should have some way set up for him to be able to notify me when he does run into it. I can work something out with a saltwater charm if you don't have phones or mine turns out not to get service here. I'm happy to hang out for a while if I have to. I'm not getting meaningfully older, I have a project to work on that could easily take me a year, I'd miss Kas if it took a long time but he routinely fucks off for months on his own anyway, I'm willing to sleep in a hammock hanging from my cloud-pine in the sky, I have a cornucopia so I won't even be relying on you guys for food."

"If you wind up staying here for months I will be so tempted to loan you my clothes and ask you to attend school instead of me," says Juliet.

"Eh, you probably don't really want to do that, I won't recognize your acquaintances or remember what you've been doing in class, and besides, I dropped completely out of my rather haphazard attendance at human school when I was fifteen," says Amariah.

"I do not, in fact, have a phone," says Sherlock.

"Saltwater charms it is. You have a pulse, right?"

"No."

"...Do you breathe?"

"Optionally."

"Okay, then this is complicated but not impossible, I'll add a motion component and you can breathe in Morse code or something to alert me if you find a door. I can find you with a divination if I don't know where you are."

"...How would it have worked if I did have a pulse?"

"I'd put the charm on your wrist or the inside of your elbow, and you'd press on the relevant vein just enough to slow it down, and my copy of the charm would inform me then. These are originally designed to notify people if the other party dies, but you can modify them for more purposeful communication," she says, and she tells her cornucopia to give her salt and a cup of water.

"I see. Fascinating."

"Magic is great! What's the stuff around here like?" Amariah murmurs the thickening charm. She takes the liberty of touching Sherlock's chin so she can tilt his head back to paint over his airway, so the charm will be able to pick up on whether and when he breathes. "Also which way is north from here?"

"I'm not sure yet. Mr. Giles sort of agreed to teach me, but he seems to think it's terribly, desperately dangerous," says Juliet. "I haven't been able to get anything out of a book to work. North is that way, I think." She points.

"Mr. Giles may be exhibiting his crust, but to a certain extent he's right," says Sherlock. "It's fairly well accepted in some circles that merely being a habitual magic user makes you tend to attract supernatural hazards. Of course, in those same circles it's fairly well accepted that being the Slayer has the same effect at ten or a hundred times the magnitude, so if Mr. Giles were operating with all the facts he might have a different recommendation. And then again, I've never heard of a Slayer who was also a witch, so there may be some traditional or actual barrier in effect there."

"What do the spells around here look like? If you've gotten as far as noting that things out of books don't work..."

"Oh, the ones I've found with stuff that seemed benign and didn't require locust wings prepared under the seventh moon of a prime-numbered lunar year or some crap like that all go like, 'Divine Hecate, behold my will, grant me this boon' and so on and so on."

"...And," says Amariah, "can divine Hecate in fact behold your will? Or is it, say - opaque?"

"...good question," says Juliet. "But I heard you invoking all sorts of goddesses."

"I've got mental opacity, but it comes from a birth blessing from a witch goddess," says Amariah. "I don't think they locked themselves out when they gave it to me. And my spells are more descriptive than 'behold my will', anyway."

"Well, that's hilarious," says Sherlock.

"It's annoying," exclaims Juliet. "Now I have to find a completely unrelated school of magic. I think they must exist - some of the nasty curses don't open with anything inviting deities to behold my will so obviously I didn't try those - but wow. Wow."

"It's hilariously annoying," he maintains.

"Okay, fine. So yours is a birth blessing - I wonder where mine comes from?"

"Stella and Golden's worlds both just have people with innate powers crop up sometimes, so Stella's an 'ingot' and Golden's a - well, they call them 'witches' apparently, but it's not the same thing as me. Angela doesn't think she has it at all, and Shell Bell knows she didn't before she met Stella and got magic loot. I don't know about you."