There isn't any one moment when she wakes up and discovers that there's somewhere to wake up in. There's just a long, hazy dream, and the gradual realization that she's dreaming it.

It's a very nice dream. Quiet. Peaceful. Oddly... familiar? Has she had this dream before?

More felt than heard, and more dreamed than felt, soft voices whisper of the comfort of eternal rest.

She feels like she's wrapped up in a cozy blanket, in that sort of half-awake way where you know you could move but can't quite find your way to actually moving. She is distant from herself, distant from her body, distant from her pain. Is this what being okay feels like? She's not sure; she doesn't have much to compare it to. It's nice, though.

Bones shift slowly through dark, warm soil.

She can't quite place the sensation at first, because, once again, she's never felt it before.

It comes clear with time, though. The reason she feels so distant from her body is that she doesn't entirely have one. The reason she feels like she's trickling together out of bones and dirt is because she is.

This is... maybe kind of concerning? As situations go, it's among the spookier ones?

It doesn't feel concerning, though. It just feels... calm, and peaceful. Even beautiful, in its own way.

She could stay here.

She could be at peace like this forever.

She could let her body lie in the ground until it rots, peacefully, and rise from it as a beautiful tree, and the forest would watch over her, and she would get to rest here forever.

—it's not that she's not tempted. She is tempted.

She is so, so tempted.

But—

There are things she misses about life.

Not many.

Books, though? She misses books. She misses... looking at herself in the mirror and feeling pretty, though she still flinches from the thought, trying not to remember the consequences. She misses brushing her hair. She misses swishy skirts, and listening to music even though her taste in music embarrasses her, and watching movies. Being a tree would be nice, but she couldn't read books anymore, or swish skirts. And maybe trees have tree things they can do that are just as good, but... they won't be those things.

She takes a long time thinking about it.

Her body finishes forming, cradled in the warm earth.

The feeling that she could move anytime she felt like it if it weren't for this wonderfully cozy blanket becomes a feeling that she really could move, really, right now, no dreamy haze or lack of muscles to prevent it, just her and her very real body lying in the dirt.

The only thing stopping her is... the fact that she doesn't want to. It's such a powerful temptation, the idea of being a tree, of never having to move or speak again. Being safe and okay and at peace forever. She wants that.

There are other things she wants more, though.

She sits up. The soil releases her without protest, crumbling softly away from her brand-new body.

She opens her eyes, looks up, and drinks in the starlight.

"This was probably a mistake," she says wryly.

It was her mistake, though. And she thinks... maybe... she thinks she feels good about making it.

Okay. Right. Taking stock.

She doesn't have any clothes, which is embarrassing and inconvenient. She doesn't have any food, or know where to get it. She doesn't know where she is. The sky suggests it isn't real. Her dreams suggest it's home.

...her dreams might have a few more suggestions, actually. She tries to sort through the fragments of memory. Now that she thinks of it, the starlight does feel oddly satisfying, and the warmth of the forest feels more than just comfortable. If she can't find food then she supposes she'll find out whether her dreams are right that she can live on starlight now.

Her dreams think she can coax bark from the trees to clothe herself. She doesn't quite feel like she knows how, and also asking someone to give you their skin just seems appallingly rude. It's probably the objectively correct next step, though. For one thing, if she confirms this specific bizarre dream power, she'll feel a lot better about the likelihood that she's now an autotroph.

For a long moment, she stares up at the painted sky, wondering how any of this is possible, and if perhaps she might still be dreaming. The rainbow of stars holds no answers.

Then she stands up, and steps tentatively toward the nearest tree, a grand old thing whose spreading branches rustle softly in the wind. It looks happy. She doesn't know how she knows it looks happy, but it does.

"Excuse me," she says, feeling extremely foolish. "May I have some bark, please?"

A shallow slice opens up in the gnarled, scaly bark, revealing a wine-red inner layer that peels up invitingly like the next page of a book. She gives it a hesitant tug, and it comes away with no more resistance than a sheet off a freshly made bed. The size is about right, too. Rough scales of outer bark litter the ground like confetti.

"Thank you very much," she says, and the tree seems to indicate that it was no trouble at all, really. New growth is already creeping along the trunk.

She brushes the dirt off herself as best she can (what she wouldn't give for a bath) and then starts trying to wrap herself in the sheet of bark. This turns out to be more of a production than she expected; she's flustered, and it's large and unwieldy, and after half a very long minute she feels about ready to burst into tears of helpless frustration.

No. Stop. Deep breath.

Like everything else in this world, there's a sense of presence in the bark. Not consciousness, exactly, but a sort of lingering aura. It was a gift from this very nice tree, and she should be treating it like something friendly and kind, something worth being kind to, not like a recalcitrant bedsheet.

She tries again, this time moving slowly and deliberately. If she wraps it up like so and like so... and lets the rest of it trail off for now... yes, that's almost like a dress. She makes a wordless, apologetic request, and the excess bark tears away in her hand; when she murmurs "could you close up here, please?" the edges seal together, and she has a dress made of bark. A few more quiet negotiations, and she has a pair of rather silly-looking slippers. The colour is still beautiful, though. If she ever dares ask for more bark, maybe eventually she'll get better at working with it.

She sits down again, smoothing out her new skirt underneath her. It's warm and pleasant to touch. With a quiet word, she tugs a stray scrap of bark off the top of a shoe, and after a moment starts twisting it into a bracelet. It would seem so ungrateful to just throw it away, considering it where it came from.

The humid air is as comforting as a blanket. She's always had trouble with summers, so she isn't sure why this weather is treating her so nicely, but it's a welcome bit of strangeness. Maybe her body is better-adapted to this forest, having been made out of its dirt. It's as good a theory as any.

Now. The forest isn't the only dream she's been having that in retrospect feels more like an omen.

She takes a deep, calming breath, and thinks back. The dreams seemed so inconsequential at the time, just a lot of nonsense her brain was scribbling on itself, but there's clearly more to them than that. So, what has she dreamed of, and what can she learn from it?

The forest is definitely clearest in her memory. She dreamed of walking among whispering leaves, breathing warmth and drinking starlight. She dreamed of health and strength, climbing cliffs and swinging through branches. She dreamed of tending gardens and listening to the flowers. She dreamed of picking up handfuls of dirt, studying it, understanding its essence. She dreamed of thanking the trees for their bark. (It hadn't felt rude at the time, to ask for it.)

And she dreamed that if she died, she would wake beneath the earth.

That part definitely happened.

Moving on, though. There were other places, other environments, she's sure of it.

She thinks she remembers... a cold, dim plane of white stone, dotted with ominous black trees. It's not comforting or inviting like this place; it's stark, blank, lifeless, faintly menacing. She does not want to go there. (The thought of going there produces a faint sense of direction, which she steadfastly ignores.)

A bright, happy college campus bustling with cheerful girls. She doesn't want to go there either—except—it does look nice, in her dream of a memory. She wouldn't necessarily have to talk to anyone. And she feels like there's something there she really wanted, even if she can't remember what it was. Maybe she was hoping there'd be books there. Actually, the thought that there might be books there is doing a lot to change her mind about visiting. (The sense of direction is stronger now, and feels closer.) But wait, speaking of books—

That's right: one of her omen-dreams showed her a library. A cozy little house with no windows, permeated by an ineffable sense of hers-ness, and it has baths, and indoor gardens, and shelves and shelves full of books! Real books that she could hold in her hands and read! All she has to do is find the place!

She jumps to her feet, excited.

That strange sense of direction, activated now more strongly than ever, says: right here.

Acting on some dreamed-up instinct, she focuses harder, trying to access that inward portal. It's hard, much harder than she expected. Is she doing it wrong? But the thought of her very own library keeps her stubbornly focused. Surely, if she keeps trying, if she's patient... surely she can be patient...

She nearly loses her grip on the bridge, and then she nearly loses it again, but after a few minutes the forest swirls away and she's standing in a cozy foyer, stone on every side. An arch leads to the next room, and stone sconces cast a warm, steady light that feels oddly thin compared to the stars of the forest.

Well. Fidgeting with her winebark bracelet, she cautiously explores.

Just out of the foyer is a little sitting room, with an arch in every direction. On the left she sees bookcases; on the right she sees a sink and cabinets; straight ahead she sees a terraced garden, full of water features and empty of plants.

She heads for the bookcases, naturally.

The room with the bookcases turns out to be a library/study, with shelves all around the outer wall and three more rows of shelves at one end of the room and then, at the other end, an enormous desk on the left and a reading nook with a comfy armchair on the right.

She sidles past the shelves in a sort of faintly embarrassed awe, and between the desk and reading nook she finds a door, a solid wooden door which opens onto a bedroom. The bed is plain, but big. There's a wardrobe and a nightstand and a, what's it called, vanity, and the next door leads into a spacious bathroom with a spacious bathtub and separate shower stall.

Please excuse her for a moment, she must Become Clean.

Right, where was she?

Cozy cave house tour!

She checks inside her wardrobe to see if Cozy Cave House provides any underwear. Alas, it does not. Onward to the kitchen!

Coming through the door into the kitchen, the first thing that's obvious is a wall on the left. She heads past it toward the countertop on the far side of the room, makes a left turn, and discovers that it was the wall of a well-stocked pantry tucked into the space between the arch she came through and another arch leading to the garden.

She isn't hungry, but she picks up a small bread roll and nibbles it just to see what Cozy Cave Food tastes like. Pretty good, it turns out! Plain, but in a comforting way, not a dull way.

Turning around and heading away from the garden, she finds that countertop stretching for quite a ways; if she's imagining the layout in her head correctly, the kitchen runs for the whole length of what was divided on the other side into a bedroom and a study/library. (Does Cozy Cave House provide measuring tapes? She'll have to poke around a bit.) Anyway, at the far end of the room there's a little breakfast table with two chairs, and a door leading to a half-bath.

Just one place left to explore...

She stands in the archway leading from the kitchen to the garden, and surveys her domain.

It's, well...

It's pretty?

Water flows along tidy little artificial streams, fountaining from pipes in the stone walls and pouring down narrow grates. In between the streams, there are beds of dirt; some are raised, while others sit flat. Off to the left, in front of where she judges the doorway from the sitting room probably is, there's a square sand garden with sparkling off-white sand and a few nice-looking rocks. She's not a rock expert but it's all very... grey, with some pale brown, the same colour scheme from inside the house part of this cave.

"This just won't do," she says aloud. Cozy Cave House is nice and all, but her dreams of the forest have taught her how to garden, and looking at this barren expanse makes her itch to take up a trowel.

Surveying the garden, she thinks about flowers.

She's expecting her mind to fill with memories of starlit shrubbery, and it does a little, but there's another memory behind them, stuck in the back of her brain like a bit of popcorn between your teeth. She does her best to wiggle it out, and remembers...

Red sand under a brass sky. Gleaming brass bees with lacy wings. Fields of beautiful metal flowers, copper petals aflame with sunlight.

Her arboreal instincts aren't too sure about gardening with metal, but she has other instincts, brass ones to go with that gleaming brass dome.

The expected alignment of her inner compass doesn't come, though. Maybe she can't get to the brass place from here?

Can she get to the white marble place from here? No. The college? No.

The forest? Yes.

So... only the forest is reachable from the Cozy Cave. Or only the last place she was before entering the Cozy Cave is reachable from the Cozy Cave. It feels more like the second thing; it feels like the door she carries in her heart leaves a waypoint behind when she enters it, and she can exit again the same way.

This bears some testing.

She goes back to the little foyer, out of a vague sense that it's best to enter and leave your house by its door, and sits on the floor and reaches across the gap between worlds. It's a little easier this time. Maybe it will get better with practice? Or maybe it just gets better if you're not flailing at it in desperate confusion. Hard to say.

The starlit forest is just as she left it.

If you'd asked her last week she would have said that a Cozy Cave House with no windows and many bookshelves and a pantry full of plain yet pleasant bread would be the most comfortable imaginable place, absolutely bar none. But she finds herself breathing easier in the forest's warm air, feeling better under its many-coloured starlight.

She will just have to make the Cozy Cave House even cozier. Step one: flowers.

Inner compass, which way to the brass place?

She turns in the indicated direction, and starts walking.

There's a spring in her step, and it feels out of place there. What business does she have being happy? Just because the forest is nice and it feels nice to be here? Just because she has a Cozy Cave House with a huge bathtub and a library? Just because she decided not to lie in the dirt and rot? She should've stayed down there. It would've been better for everyone.

...she shakes her head. No, that's not right. She's not harming anyone. She did admittedly make herself a dress out of someone's skin, but the tree seemed happy to help, and its bark has already regrown. She can just... exist, by herself, in this welcoming forest and her private cave house, and no one can possibly be any worse off than they would be if she turned into a tree.

With renewed purpose, she keeps walking.

...this dress is nice. It doesn't quite swish, but it has a pleasant weight to it. It is just about the worst dress she can imagine herself making with the tools and materials available, and as she walks she begins to tentatively imagine making better ones, and she finds she quite likes the idea.

(It also occurs to her that perhaps part of the reason she feels drawn to the Planet of College Girls is that she might be able to find underpants there. Well - the need for underpants is not all that urgent at the present time. She thinks she'd rather focus on flowers for now.)

The forest is beautiful.

Every tree is a unique character, some familiar, some strange. She wishes she knew more about trees. It would be nice to be able to look at something and say 'that's an oak' instead of 'well, it has leaves, and I think I saw one in a park once'. On the other hand, no amount of knowing things about trees is going to explain that one over there with the blue bark that looks almost iridescent. Or at least she's pretty sure it won't? Did Earth have trees like that?

—thinking of Earth brings up her internal compass, and she stumbles to a halt, staring blankly into the distance.

Earth is still there???

Well—of course it's still there, she's the one who died, but—she can just go to it?

She can just go... home?

...what if she doesn't want to?

What if she does want to?? What if—

No.

Stop.

Deep breath.

She does not have to do anything about Earth.

Even though it's there, even though she can go to it.

The continued existence of Earth represents, among other things, a possible alternate source of underpants, but if she'd rather take her chances on the Planet of College Girls she can just do that.

She isn't sure how long she spent being slowly assembled underneath the forest, but it was a good long while. It's reasonably likely that back at home she is at best a missing person, at worst a waterlogged body already retrieved from the lake and wept over by Aunt Gail.

(Wept over by Luke, too? She can't imagine him crying. She can't imagine him regretting what he said to her. It feels like a wrong she's doing him, to be this bad at imagining it.)

...regardless, Earth can just keep on keeping on without her. It doesn't change anything, that she has the option to go back. An option is not a constraint.

She steadies herself, breathing deeply of the humid air, and sets her internal compass to brass bees and copper flowers, and starts walking again.

The forest is still beautiful. Leaf litter crunches underfoot, and rainbow starlight filters through the leaves. She isn't sure exactly how far away the brass place is from here. She isn't sure it matters. If she gets tired, she can go home to the Cozy Cave and sleep.

As it turns out, though, it does not take her a full day to walk to the spot where her internal compass says she can find that rust-red sand.

She only feels about a one-hour-walk amount of tired when her sense of its position goes from 'that way' to 'over there', and it's only a few minutes after that when 'over there' becomes 'very close', and she ducks into the shelter of a rocky overhang and her internal compass hums here, here. There's even a glint of metal poking out of the ground, and she thinks she can faintly hear the ticking of the great brass dome.

She closes her eyes, the better to concentrate, and focuses on the place where the clockwork sun feels closest. Her normal senses can't see it at all, but to her dream senses it's like a neon sign, This Way To The Brass Place.

Once again, it takes her a few minutes to make her way through to the other side.

...in its own way, the brass place is just as beautiful as the forest.

It is not, however, nearly so welcoming.

The starlit forest makes breathing feel like a comforting embrace. The Cozy Cave House overflows with an essence of just-for-her that makes her feel safer there than she ever felt in her life.

Under the brass dome, looking out across a field of silvery grass speckled with copper wildflowers, she feels a faint unease that refuses to ebb. It's like there's some deep resonance in the world that she's not quite aligned with, and the dissonance is buzzing in her bones.

Well. She's here now, and she's going to gather flowers.

"Dream instincts to the rescue once again," she mutters to herself, stepping carefully through the patchy grass. What metal is that? It's vaguely silver-coloured, but most metals are. Her dream instincts are no help at all with identifying the metals by names she knows, but what they do help with is knowing how to walk between them without hurting herself, and how to safely uproot a flower when she finds one she likes the look of. She can even take a handful of sand, if she's careful, though not much more than that if she cares about the rest of the flowers—but a handful of sand is enough to get started, in the Cozy Cave Garden.

She hunts through the flowers until she finds the prettiest one, a delicate golden blossom with its long round petals all gathered inward into a sort of skirt. Maybe she could make a dress that looks like that... no, focus. Ever so carefully, she digs in the sand to get the flower up into her cupped hands with a little sand still around it. The ends of its roots prickle against her fingers. She closes her eyes and focuses homeward.

The first thing she feels, when she finally makes it back to the Cozy Cave across the long twisting bridge between worlds, is deep relief.

The second is self-consciousness, naturally.

Very carefully, she carries her golden flower with its double handful of red sand straight through the sitting room and out to the garden, and with every careful step and every dribble of sand onto the floor she is thinking (and occasionally muttering aloud), "Should've brought a bucket! Why didn't I bring a bucket! I am a bucketless fool!"

But, bucketless fool or no, she gets the flower and nearly all of its sand safely ensconced in the middle of the sand garden. (It seems like the logical place.)

And then she gets up, and dusts off her hands, and checks the big sturdy cabinets that seem like they might be her garden's equivalent of a garden shed, and among many other useful garden-related items she does indeed find a plain wooden bucket.

"I feel very silly right now," she informs it.

The bucket has no response.

She was not really expecting it to.

Well. After that little adventure, she thinks she and her sheepishness would like to wander over to the library and see what there is to see.

Right, so, the good news: there are a lot of books.

The bad news: relatively few of them are in... alphabets... that she recognizes?

The somewhat perplexing yet very welcome news: she finds herself with a dream-memory of sitting at that desk puzzling out all kinds of languages she's never heard of before. If she's following what the dreams were trying to tell her, she has some kind of dream-instinct for languages now, and any book in her library will be one she can read... eventually.

Eventually isn't now, though, and right now she wants to be plonked in that armchair with a book written in English. She grabs the first one she sees.

For a few hours, there doesn't have to be such a thing as her, because instead of experiencing herself she is experiencing this story about a librarian escaping political turmoil to live on an island and grow raspberries.

She emerges slightly tired, slightly creaky, and thinking longingly of raspberry jam. Do her dreams have anything to say about magical jam powers, or the location of the nearest raspberry bush?

Money can be exchanged for goods and services.

Yes, yes. Besides that.

She gets up, stretches, puts the book away, and checks her pantry. Jamless. Sitting on a stool at the kitchen island, she tries to broaden her dream-search. There's got to be something...

A hint of a glimmer of a notion: if she went to the brass place, and deepened her connection with it, she could learn to safely eat the fruit there.

The brass place is so intimidating, though. And it feels like deepening her connection will take quite a long time. Probably after all that she will no longer have this very specific raspberry yearning. She doesn't even normally like raspberries. In fact, now that she thinks of it, strawberries sound nicer.

She ponders strawberries.

If she gathers up some of the good dirt from the forest, the stuff her dreams told her about, maybe she could grow strawberries in her garden. If she could find some somewhere. Earth has them but she's not keen to go back. The Planet of College Girls probably has them, but she doesn't have any money there. Well, at the moment she doesn't have any money on Earth either, and also it's a big planet and she doesn't know how the portals decide where to put you so there's really no guarantee that she'd land somewhere that would take her money if she did have any.

She thinks she might want to try, though.

Okay. She should get her bucket. She should go back to the brass place, and pick a few more flowers, and maybe walk a little farther and see if she can scrounge an acorn and some black sand to grow it in, because her dreams think she could learn to work metal as easily as winebark if she grows an iron tree, and that just sounds neat.

After that, she can go back to the forest, and take home a bucket of loam, and then... Planet of College Girls? Yes, she thinks so. It can't possibly be worse than college.

Step One: Bucket.

She's going to make this face every time she picks up her bucket from now on, isn't she.

Well, nothing for it. She focuses, and makes her slow effortful way across the bridge in her heart to land amid the shining flowers.

It isn't safe for the flowers to dig out much sand from around them, but she makes her way carefully through the field and takes a double handful with each flower she picks. A copper one with many delicate pointed petals; a silver one whose petals are ruffled like petticoats, with a pleasing three-way symmetry. She wishes she knew the names of more flowers. She'd recognize a rose if she saw one, but that's about where her flower knowledge begins and ends. Oh, and dandelions. She would probably recognize a dandelion. There don't seem to be any around here. Maybe she can find a book on plant identification?

Maybe she can do that later, once the Plan is complete.

For now, she fills her bucket with flowers nestled in sand—four of them in total, the two from before plus a variant of the copper one with shorter, less elegant petals and a different copper one with a big round face that almost makes her think of sunflowers—and navigates the bridge back home to plant them.

In her sand garden, the red sand is already starting to spread outward from where she left it, overtaking the pale stuff that came with the house.

This is an expected feature of the Cozy Cave but it's still nice to see it confirmed.

She nestles each flower carefully in its own double handful of sand, tips the rest of the sand out of the bucket so as not to waste any, then heads right back out to the brass place. All this hopping back and forth is getting a little tedious, but, she supposes, it's not like she has any urgent appointments.

It's a long walk through the field of flowers to get to the smudge on the horizon that looks like it might be a forest, but then it does in fact turn out to be a forest, every tree black on black like a leafy wrought-iron fence. She steps far enough inside to be sure of getting unmixed black sand, then starts scooping it into her bucket by the glittering handful, one every few steps as she keeps an eye out for acorns. The bucket is half full by the time she finds one, and it looks wrong for an acorn, weirdly out of proportion. Is it deformed? Unripe, or whatever the acorn equivalent is? Or does she just not know what acorns are supposed to look like?

She studies it more closely, trying to call on her dream knowledge, and when she stops fretting and lets herself breathe, her dream knowledge answers. Yes, this is the right type of acorn for this type of tree, and it's ready to grow. All she has to do is take it home and plant it.

Satisfied, she drops the acorn in her bucket of sand and closes her eyes and turns her thoughts homeward again.

Red sand is making a solid effort to take over the sand garden entirely.

She wonders if she should be trying to preserve that white sand. Maybe she'll dig out a little spot for it somewhere, just in case she wants some later.

For now, though, she needs to plant this tree. She grabs a shovel and some work gloves out of the garden tools and heads past the sand garden to the back wall, where she thought she saw a small enough bed of dirt that she might be able to dig it all out in a reasonable timeframe. And there it is! A circle of dirt bordered in stone and surrounded by water, a perfect place to plant her iron oak. (She is at least fairly confident of the correspondence between acorns and oaks.)

Shoveling dirt is hard work, but no harder than she expected, really. She clears out the spot, piling the dirt onto neighbouring beds. Maybe the black sand would just take over the dirt like the red sand is taking over the white sand, but she doesn't want to leave that up to chance, and the dirt is so wet by comparison - what if the acorn rusts? She is informed that rust is bad for acorns. So, no dirt.

One grubby and effortful hour later, or thereabouts, she contends with the bucket once more to get the sand piled up in the middle of the empty bed and the acorn planted in the pile. So far, so good.

Part of her wants to immediately go take another shower, but the next step of the plan involves visiting the starlit forest and coming back with as much dirt as she can carry, so she might as well leave showering for after that.

She considers taking the bucket along, but she doesn't really think one bucketful of dirt will be enough. She wants to take over her garden with it, perhaps leaving one or two beds alone just to study the contrast and in case she someday meets a plant delicate enough to turn up its nose at magic dirt. She might end up asking another tree for its bark, even though asking trees for their bark makes her feel incredibly awkward, and making a sort of sack and carrying dirt with that. She should, however, bring her shovel, to fill the sack faster. And her gloves, to better hold the shovel.

Thusly equipped, she sets off.

In the brass place, she follows her internal compass back to the world-bridge, and at the bridge she makes her slow laborious way through to the forest, and in the forest she walks for a few minutes to get away from the rocky overhang and deeper into the trees where the dirt is friendlier. She's not sure how she's detecting the friendliness of the dirt. There's just something about it. Dream instincts, probably.

Anyway, it's time for May I Please Have Your Skin, the worst part of this whole expedition.

"Um," she says, awkwardly, to the nearest tree. "May I please have some bark? I need to make a bag to carry dirt in."

The nearest tree is glad to provide!

She feels so complicated about this!

But, after sitting down and folding the sheet of bark in half and closing up the edges with polite, nervous coaxing, she has a sack. A reasonably sized, reasonably sturdy sack. She proceeds to shovel dirt into it.

The sack, when full, is heavy enough that she has some trouble lifting it. She would've had even more trouble, before her dream-powers. She's not sure how she feels about that. She still thinks of herself as a small, delicate, largely useless creature, but here she is hefting a bag of dirt that weighs more than she does and not feeling more than a moderate strain.

Rather than dwell on the personal and philosophical implications of that, she focuses her way through the inward bridge to the Cozy Cave, and takes her bag of dirt out to the garden to distribute a thin layer of it across most of the empty soil beds. It covers, all told, about half the room. The loam of the starlit forest is a rich coffee-black colour that makes the ordinary dirt look pale and sickly by comparison.

She does smile, a little, looking out across her garden and thinking about the things she could plant there. Perhaps one day she will have strawberries.

For now, she has a shower.

As friendly as the forest's dirt is, there is an undeniable allure to not having any on you.

And then—

At this point in her plan, she was supposed to go to the Planet of College Girls. But her bathroom has a mirror, and when she looks at herself in it, she looks like a wardrobe malfunction waiting to happen.

This dress is very nice, and she is grateful to the tree that provided the bark for it, but she can't face the prospect of speaking to another human-adjacent being while wearing it.

It admittedly does hold up very well to light garden work, but the problem isn't just that she's afraid of it falling off, it's that she's afraid of other people looking at her and expecting it to fall off, and in that department it has some issues.

So. Now she has to decide whether to gather all her social courage and go to the College Planet anyway, or whether she would rather go back to the forest and get more bark and take it home and put more time and effort into making a better dress.

It really is awkward, asking trees for their skin. She'd rather do as little of it as she can get away with.

But—they don't seem to think it's awkward. That's been pretty consistent so far. And they heal up very quickly afterward, without any apparent discomfort.

If they seemed upset or unhappy or harmed, that would be one thing. But as far as she can tell, they're fine. The misgivings are coming from inside the house.

So... yes, she thinks she'll try again on the dress.

She's going to be smart about it, though.

She heads into the library, and starts patiently scanning the shelves. If she's making an entire second dress with real time and real effort before she visits the Planet of College Girls, then she's not in any rush and she can afford to do some indexing first. Which books are in English, and do any of them cover relevant topics?

Perhaps she'll be interested in this illustrated botanical guide. It's in French.

That is not at all relevant to the current project... but she has enough high school French to puzzle through it even without magical dream powers, and she wants to know some names for her flowers even if they're French names. She puts it on her desk for later and continues methodically searching the shelves.

No handy sewing books with ready-to-go dress patterns, but she might be interested in this leatherworking manual.

You know what, given the observed properties of the bark, she'll take it. Though she doubts she has any of the relevant tools. She would not have predicted ahead of time that her house would need a crafting workshop but she finds herself really wishing for her house to manifest a crafting workshop.

...actually, wait... come to think of it, she does have the sense that this place is going to grow over time. A crafting workshop might just be in the cards, if it grows in a convenient enough fashion.

Standing amid the shelves, holding the leatherworking manual, she gazes into the middle distance and wonders if she should wait for the crafting workshop before she makes her second dress. Surely that would be reasonable, right? It could have real stitched seams if she did that. She'd waste less material on being bad at things if she could have all the right tools from the start.

...but she doesn't know how long it will take, or even if it will happen at all. Her Cozy Cave House has been very kind to her on a number of levels so far, but the wardrobe is completely empty; who's to say her crafting workshop wouldn't just be a big room with some tables in it? She has kitchen tools and gardening tools, but no clothing, and she hasn't spotted a hairbrush yet. The things this place provides to her are inconsistent at best.

She can gather more information about this. She leaves the leatherworking manual on the desk and goes to check if any of the bedroom furniture contains hairbrushes.

There's one in a drawer in the vanity.

Promising, but not conclusive.

Well.

...she thinks she will go get some bark anyway, and try making a dress, even though she will be able to make a better dress later. Really, whether or not she has the proper tools for the job, the second dress she ever makes is still going to be worse than the third. Such is the unavoidable nature of being a person learning a skill. And—hmm—

She decided not to be a tree, is the thing.

If she wanted to never do anything awkward or embarrassing or suboptimal again, she could go back to the starlit forest and lie down in the dirt and wait, and then she would be a tree, and she would never have any problems ever again.

But instead she wants to live in her Cozy Cave House and read books and grow strawberries.

It's not that making the occasional could-be-better dress is strictly necessary to her chosen lifestyle. It's just that... she decided that as long as she's not hurting anyone she would rather be alive than dead. And she suspects that, if she listens to the part of her that wants to do everything perfectly all the time, she will eventually end up doing nothing at all, waiting for perfection to happen by itself. Which is definitely tree behaviour.

In conclusion, it is time to go get some bark.

She meditates through the bridge to the forest, and walks a little ways away from where she dug up that sackful of dirt, and asks a few more trees for their bark. She'd rather not take too much from any one tree, no matter how happy they are to give it to her, and if she's going to be seriously trying to create acceptable clothes then she might need to try multiple different approaches so she'd better have plenty of materials or she'll have to keep coming back here.

Arms laden with bark, she returns home.

For lack of a more sensible work surface, she piles up the bark on her kitchen counter, then fetches the book on leathercraft and sits down to read it.

It's short, and not all that applicable to her tool-less attempt to make an entire outfit out of leather. If she needed a belt she'd be all set. A wallet or purse, likewise. A dress not so much. But it's more information than she had before she read it, and it at least helps her think about things like how to construct a reasonable seam.

She puts the book aside, grabs the top piece of bark off the stack, and starts trying to figure out how to make a sort of bodice situation out of it. It would be convenient if her kitchen had a mirror. Actually, she's just going to carry this piece of bark to her bathroom and wrap it awkwardly around herself and stare at it in the mirror a lot.

(She immediately remembers, when she gets to the bathroom, that there was another bathroom that was much closer to the kitchen. Oh well. Its mirror was probably smaller, anyway.)

After some uncertain squinting in the mirror, she tentatively coaxes the piece of bark to fold in a few places, then takes it back to the kitchen table to work on it. In theory, if she makes a nice neat row of holes along this edge and another nice neat row of holes along that fold line, and uses what she learned from making her bracelet to make a long cord, she can string the cord through the laces and this other folded bit will lie behind the laces and she will have a sort of vest that laces up in front and doesn't make her look like a—doesn't make her look bad. And the lacing up in front will hopefully make it both more obvious and more true that it stays up on its own.

She gets to work.

Making the holes nice and neat and all in a straight line is difficult, especially since she has to patiently coax the bark into allowing each one, but she works at it slowly and carefully and it goes faster than she would've thought from how slow and careful she's being. Then she has to make the cord, which turns out to be more difficult than making her little bracelet but not by that much especially once she figures out that braiding three sort of dubious strands together can make one cord that's much less dubious than the sum of its parts.

She patiently threads the cord through the holes, and takes the whole situation into the bathroom, and wiggles out of her dress to check the fit, and wouldn't you know it! She has made a garment! It looks sort of odd, and some of the edges are rougher than she'd like, but: garment!

She immediately takes it off and wiggles back into her dress, because she does not feel comfortable wandering around the house like that even though the house has no windows and also no entrances or exits.

Then it's back to the kitchen island to work on a skirt. A wrap skirt, maybe, if she has a big enough piece of bark for that to be sensible... she digs through the pile, and eventually finds one that looks about right.

She probably doesn't need a mirror for this part but she goes back to the bathroom anyway, and rearranges the sheet of bark several times, and politely requests that it fold here and seal there and separate over there, and with the separated bit she makes a much thicker braided cord to use as a sort of belt strung through the folded-over waistline, and when she tries it on with the lace-up bodice she definitely looks a little bizarre but now it's a more intentional kind of bizarre. Acceptable.

She hangs up the old dress in her wardrobe, and gives it a little pat, and goes back to her kitchen island intending to make shoes.

When she gets there, though, and is sorting through the pile again, she sees a strip of bark that's a little narrower and a lot longer than the one she used to make her bodice, and she is seized by inspiration and drags it back to the bathroom to try to figure out how to construct a loincloth.

The less said about this process, the better.

At the end of it, though, she has a reasonable approximation of underwear, and the world is accordingly a better place than it was twenty minutes ago.

Now she can work on shoes.

Her current shoes are... sort of okay... but they are also very visibly made out of weird scraps cobbled (heh) together by a complete amateur, and she can do better than that just by being careful and intentional about which pieces of bark she uses and how she puts them together. And she can add laces. Laces, it turns out, are pretty important.

So, if she folds this bit here, and that bit over there... remembering to do everything symmetrically on both shoes, by far the worst thing about her current shoes is how much she didn't do that... and then she takes them off to make all the holes for the laces, again being very careful to keep everything symmetrical...

Triumph! Success! Shoes!

They're a sort of lace-up slipper that goes up just past her ankles, and they don't have weird extraneous bits that flap around awkwardly when she walks in them, and she is very pleased with herself.

She puts her other shoes just outside the doorway from the sitting room to the garden; they can be her gardening shoes, maybe.

All the rest of the pile of bark gets folded up as neatly as she can manage and left at the far end of the kitchen counter, in the corner by the breakfast table. She could put it in a cabinet, but there are a lot of cabinets and she's sort of afraid she'll forget which one.

And now, she has utterly lost track of the time, even to the extent that she knew what time it was before, which she mostly didn't.

She takes stock of herself. Does she feel like sleeping? Yeah, kind of.

So she puts her new clothes away in her closet and leaves her new shoes next to her bed and figures out how to turn the lights off (there's a switch by the door, but it's a dimmer knob and looked decorative), and she curls up and goes to sleep.

One restful sleep later, she sits up, opens her eyes, and says, "Oh heck, I forgot about the sand!"

Hurrying into her clothes and out to the garden reveals... that the red sand has taken over most of the middle of the sand garden, but there's a border of white sand left around the edge, about as wide as her hand.

"Whew."

Yawning, she trundles over to the pantry and grabs another little bread roll to have for breakfast. The Cozy Cave is lovely but she really wants to figure out a way to import the forest's multicoloured starlight. She's barely spent a few hours of her life under it all told, and she already feels like she won't be properly awake until she's had some. Bread first, though. Oh, she should figure out if the bathroom has toothbrushes...

After stumbling through an approximation of a morning routine, and putting her shoes on, and taking a few minutes just to sit in the armchair in her library and smile at the books, she feels ready to face the day.

Before she was interrupted by sartorial necessity, she was planning to visit the Planet of College Girls and see if she can populate her garden somehow or other using plants she finds there.

She thinks, overall, that she would still like to do that. Well, no, she's moderately terrified of doing that, but... she wants strawberries, and this is a way to get strawberries, and although she doesn't really have the first clue how to go from "traversing a bridge to the College Girls Planet" to "having strawberries growing in her garden", she's not going to get more of a clue by sitting around being afraid of talking to strangers. Sitting around being afraid of talking to strangers is tree behaviour.

...maybe she could stay in and read one book first, though...

No! That is the Dirt Voice talking! That is the siren lure of the grave!

She must be strong. She must pursue her goals even when pursuing them is scary. She must go to the Planet of College Girls and look for strawberries there. Even though she will probably have social interactions with strangers and the strangers probably won't speak English and it will be horribly embarrassing and the chances she will find strawberries are overall pretty low. Even so.

Resolutely, she focuses her way to the forest.

...the forest is such a breath of fresh air. Which is weird, because the air here is heavy and warm and should objectively not be all that refreshing. But it's comfortable and comforting and it goes well with the starlight. She feels refreshed and rejuvenated and maybe even ready to speak to a stranger.

Which way to the Planet of College Girls?

Her internal compass points, and she sets off.

The walk is longer than she expected.

But her new shoes feel nice to walk in, and her new body feels nice to walk with, and the air is warm and the trees are beautiful and the sky is full of starlight.

As she approaches the bridge, she feels calm and invigorated. Maybe a little nervous, but handling it.

...something feels wrong here. Something feels—like the siren lure of the grave, except instead of being warm and comforting like the whispers under the earth, it's the pull of despair, the need to be erased because surely the world cannot stand to be marred by her presence any longer.

This is perhaps a bad sign about the Planet of College Girls.

But right now she feels full of courage and starlight, and anyway, if she understands her dreams correctly, the worst thing that can happen to her is that she ends up under the forest again waiting for her bones. That's not so bad. She got out of that bed once, she can do it again.

She finds the place where the feeling is strongest, and meditates on the bridge.

On the other side is a broad green lawn, crisscrossed by well-kept paths. Birds are chirping in the morning sun. Girls with brightly coloured hair stroll along the paths, carrying bookbags or backpacks or just binders by the armload.

The undercurrent of despair has vanished.

—and yet, she staggers on the landing.

She can't even tell what's wrong. Maybe nothing is wrong. Maybe she got too used to the comforts of her cozy cave and her welcoming forest, and forgot what it's like to stand in a place that doesn't care about you. Except it can't be that, because the brass place doesn't care about her and it doesn't feel like this there. Standing here, surrounded by peace and happiness, she feels like she's encased in glass, unable to reach out and touch the reality of this world.

Something tugs at her mind, a whisper of thought, an echo of dream. It tells her that this is part of her dream powers, that the more deeply connected to a world she is, the more comfortable she is with it and the more comfortable it is with her; and she has no connections to this world at all beyond the very first step of being able to find it and able to grow more connected. She feels empty in this place because she is empty of it.

It would take such a very long time, to be anything less than empty here. Years. Years and years.

But... maybe that's okay? Maybe she does not need to flee immediately?

It can be a long-term project. She can spend a little time here, now and then. She can venture here looking for strawberries. She can listen to the murmur of conversation as people wander past her in the park, and try to pick up the language a little.

She takes a deep breath and a single step forward.

A passing stranger looks at her, flinches, and hurries past.

Oh, she does not feel good about that.

She glances back at the bridge. On this side, it's in a little gazebo. It looks abandoned; drifts of leaf litter have built up under the benches. There's a faint hint of Arbor's heat in the air, fading as she walks away.

It's hard to walk away from the safety of the forest into the vast unknown of a place full of strangers who flinch when they look at her.

She's done hard things before, though.

It occurs to her, as she walks, that her outfit is very eye-catching and she wishes it were less so. Not much she can do about it now, though.

She tries to listen to the voices around her as she walks. Mostly people are too far away for her to catch the words, but she hears enough to be pretty sure she does not, in fact, speak the language. That will change with time, she's told. She hopes that's true.

There's not much in the way of berry bushes here. She sees what she thinks is a cherry tree, covered in pink flowers, but she's fairly sure you can't grow a tree from flowers... although... her gardening instincts seem to suggest she could grow it from a branch, if she wanted. Particularly with the help of that rich black soil.

She glances around, trying to pick a moment when no one is looking. In a sense it's convenient that everyone seems so reluctant to look at her.

Then she picks a branch that looks right to her dream-instincts, breaks it off as neatly as she can, and hurries back to the derelict gazebo to meditate through the bridge.

A stranger asks her a question, in a language she still doesn't speak.

She hears their voice distantly, and ignores it. The distraction sets her back a little, but she perseveres.

And then she's safe in the forest again, with an embarrassing urge to hug a tree.

Instead, she sits down and resumes meditating, this time going back home to the Cozy Cave. She could've traveled directly there, but—she needed that moment of relief she always feels when she steps into the forest. The Planet of College Girls is just very unsettling.

Right, okay. She has a branch of a cherry tree and she is going to plant it.

Normally (or so her instincts tell her), you have to do a whole lot of things in order to coax a branch to turn into a tree. If, however, you have garden beds full of the rich black loam of the forest, then you can skip most of those steps and instead just jam the branch into the ground and wait. So that's the plan.

While she's out in the garden, she checks on her other plantings. The flowers are doing well, and now that she looks for them, she sees a few silver and copper shoots already coming up in the red sand. The tree at the back of the garden has put up a couple of small black leaves; she has the urge to pat them, but resists. Best not to disturb the little guy so early.

Inspections complete, she looks around for a good spot to plant her cherry tree. That back corner appeals to her, but she didn't put any loam down there, and she's eager to get the branch in the ground without spending a long time preparing first, so instead she plants it closer to the middle of the room, at one end of a long bed that she thinks would look nice as a row of cherry trees eventually.

She has done a difficult and frightening thing and received the reward of possible future cherries, and she feels good about herself. Time to read a book.

This book of pie recipes has lots of pretty pictures!

Ooh.

In theory she could read her botanical guide and see if she can identify any of her flowers, but instead she would like to curl up in her cozy armchair and look at pretty pictures of pie.

It turns out that the pie book is not in English—it's one of the alphabets she doesn't recognize—which might be a good thing, because if the pie recipes were in English she might be very sad about not having the ingredients to make them. Wait, or does she? She has only ever found bread in her pantry but then she has only ever inspected her pantry very shallowly. Distracted from pie pictures, she gets up and wanders over to the kitchen.

Her pantry does contain butter, flour, and other extremely basic staple ingredients like rice. It doesn't seem to have any jam but it does seem to have mason jars, of the sort with the weird two-part lids that she thinks she remembers you're supposed to seal up by boiling them? The jam future is within her grasp. Just as soon as her cherry tree grows up big and strong. If it's even a type of tree that really does make cherries, which she's not sure of. She should maybe go back to the Planet of College Girls and steal more plants. Or, actually, she should consult her botanical guide and try to identify what she has in her garden.

To the library!

She brings the book out to the garden and flips through it looking for pictures that match her flowers. The gold one seems to be a crocus; the silver one seems to be an iris. She was right about that sunflower—tournesol, it says. The other two copper flowers are harder to identify, but she thinks the one with long narrow petals is clearly somewhere in the aster category, and the smaller one might be a different type of aster? Thank goodness for Latin taxonomy, it makes reading botanical guides in foreign languages so much easier.

As for her trees, she finds pictures that seem to indicate her weird-looking acorn was normal for some species, and she flips through page after page of cherry subspecies without finding any exact matches for the specific flowers on her specific branch. It does seem to be some sort of cherry tree, but she'll just have to wait and see if cherries are in the cards. Really, she should've guessed that plants from different worlds won't necessarily appear in the same botanical guides. She's lucky her metal flowers resemble any Earth plants at all.

She puts her botanical guide back on the desk.

...she has already been to the Planet of College Girls once today, and she doesn't want to go back... but... the more time she spends there, the faster she will gain a deeper connection to it, and also learn its language, and perhaps eventually be able to buy plants instead of pirating them. Maybe... maybe she could take a book there, and sit in the gazebo and read the book?

She looks through her library for a book that seems like it would be interesting to read but not so interesting that she would be sad if someone grabbed it from her and ran off with it.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, by Oliver Sacks?

How thoroughly peculiar. She'll take it.

She meditates through to the forest, and smiles when she feels its warmth.

She meditates through to the gazebo, and peeks out at the paths. Nobody's walking along them, this time. The sun has shifted quite a ways through the sky. Satisfied that she's probably safe from interruptions, she sits down and reads.

It's definitely less relaxing than reading at home, but... nice in its own way? The sunlight, the faint smell of grass. Even though the gazebo is a bit run-down, it's still pretty. Even though its benches are uncomfortable and a little dirty, they're still a fine place to sit. And the book is very weird, but not too bad, really.

When she finishes the book, she sits quietly for a minute, watching the shadows crawl across the floor.

Sticks her hand out into the sunlight, to feel how her body soaks it up. Purer and less satisfying than the many-hued light of the forest, but again, in its own way, it's nice.

So far, the Planet of College Girls hasn't been nearly as scary as it made itself out to be. She can imagine a future where she comes back here every day, to sit and read a book and maybe walk around a little. She can imagine liking that future.

In fact, maybe...

She meditates straight home to the Cozy Cave,

and puts away her book,

and meditates straight back to the gazebo—

—and makes a brief, futile motion of her hands at her waist, and a mental note to include pockets in the next iteration of this outfit—

And she steps out for a little stroll, just to see the sights and spend a little more time absorbing the essence of the world.

It's a lovely world, full of trees and sunlight.

Standing in it still feels a little bit like gasping for air in a vacuum.

It'll get better. She's been told that it'll get better, and so far her dreams have been right about every other thing they've claimed.

And she... wants it to get better?

She wants to be able to go for a nice walk in this pleasant afternoon sun softened by this partly cloudy sky, and not feel slightly terrible the whole time.

She wants to be able to talk to the brightly coloured college girls, and have shallow conversations about what they're studying and what books they like to read.

She wants to be able to find out if there's a store somewhere that will sell plants for her garden so she won't have to steal them.

She could run away from this place—but she doesn't want to.

She tries to stay out of the building complexes and keep to the more park-like areas as she walks. At first she just keeps her internal compass pointed behind her at the gazebo that leads to the starlit forest, but then she idly wonders if there are bridges here to the other worlds she's familiar with. It turns out there are: this way to the brass place, and that way to Earth, and this other way to the bleak expanse of marble...

She stops in her tracks, when she has that thought.

She has ventured into the Planet of College Girls, and is learning to be okay here even though it's scary.

Could she learn to be okay in the bleak place, too? Should she? Is continuing to avoid it just the coward's way out?

...no... no, she doesn't think so. She can focus on one place at a time. It's better, in a sense, to focus on one place at a time, because it means she'll connect with it faster.

Maybe someday she'll try to visit the bleak place, but someday doesn't have to be now.

She keeps walking.

Brightly-coloured college girls begin to trickle out of buildings as the current class period lets out. They steer clear of her, with many worried glances and suspicious murmurs.

...she has to stop, and find an out-of-the-way bench to sit on; she can't make herself keep taking up the sidewalks once she sees someone cross the street to avoid her.

It's upsetting. It feels—like that breath of despair she felt, the first time she approached this world's bridge. It feels like something is wrong, and like she is the thing that is wrong. It feels like Luke yelling at her for cheating on him. It feels like believing what he yelled at her.

It would be so easy to give in, wouldn't it?

The shadows are closing in around her.

She wants to crawl into a hole and disappear. Evidently the entire population of the College Planet agrees. It would be best and simplest for everyone if she just—if she just—

—what, jumped in a lake?

She has tried that already.

She takes a deep breath of thin, weak air.

Being despised by all who look upon her is a grindingly awful experience and there's no use denying that.

But she knows why this is happening and she knows how to solve it.

She just has to make it a few years. A few years feels like a long time, but it isn't really.

She should learn how to tell time here, and learn when to get out of everyone's way so they can use their streets in peace. She doesn't like impinging on them like this, she doesn't want to, and she doesn't need to.

But she also doesn't need to curl into a miserable ball and wish death on herself. Death is not available. If she wants to be a tree, she knows where to go.

She wipes her eyes and stands up.

Part of her does yearn, as she turns back toward Arbor, for the peace and simplicity of putting down roots. Part of what makes it a little easier to get up and walk is the thought that she could be walking toward a final resting place where she will never bother anyone again.

But she has decided not to be a tree, and she doesn't plan to go back on that. If she really does think that she should never bother anyone again, she can just not come back to the College Planet in particular.

The bustle tapers off as she walks. By the time she makes it back to the gazebo, all is quiet under the last rays of the setting sun.

And yet she can't shake the sense that she's being watched.

It's probably just paranoia. The experience she just had would make anyone paranoid. Back at home she often felt like everyone around her was disturbed by her presence, but it turns out there's a world of difference between that and seeing them actually act like it.

She stands in the gazebo and closes her eyes and makes her way slowly across the bridge.

Her knees buckle and her hands sink into the loam. Tears prickle in her eyes and her throat aches with stifled sobs.

The air is a warm blanket, and the starlight is a refreshing drink. The trees are happy to see her.

She curls up on the ground and cries, quietly and painfully.

Okay.

Okay. She's okay.

She sits up, pushing her hair out of her face with dirt-caked fingers. She's leaning against the trunk of a tree, which seems concerned for her. She tries to muster a reassuring smile but can't seem to find one anywhere. "I'm okay," she says anyway. "Thank you." The tree reluctantly accepts this.

After a few deep breaths to steady herself, she meditates her way the the Cozy Cave, and heads straight to the bath.

Much better.

After that ordeal, she thinks she would like to spend a long time curled up in her cozy reading nook.

She drifts slowly through the shelves of her library, running her fingers over the spines of the books, thinking about that wonderful one she read earlier with the librarian and the jam. The librarian had a pretty stressful time, too, but she kept trying to connect with people even though it was difficult and upsetting, and eventually she was better off for it.

Here's a slim travelogue titled Journeys of a Conduit.

Sure, that sounds like a place to start.

Retreating to her armchair, she settles in.

It doesn't take her long to figure out that the writer is talking about dream powers like the ones she has (which they say are the mark of a "Conduit"), and a cozy cave house not too different from hers. They call it a "Bevin", and the links between worlds "bridges"—that did start to seem like the right word after she'd been struggling across them for a while—though this person seems to find them much less of a struggle, or is maybe just eliding over the few minutes of effort every time.

Many of these worlds are ones that don't appear in her dreams at all. Rorch, Yomi, Crucible - she kind of hopes she never meets the latter two, though Rorch sounds kind of okay.

Others are more familiar. Brazen, the brass place. Arbor, the starlit forest. Earth, of course, which seems to also be where this person started.

The bleak plane of marble seems to be called "the Prison", and is apparently full of unknown beings encased in stone, and stone that tries to encase you if you stand still for too long, and trees that send blobby rubber minions to attack you if you disturb them. She thinks, perhaps, out of all the worlds she needs to build deeper connections with, she will leave that one for last. In fact she might leave it for never. She can decide when she gets that far down the list.

The writer has heard secondhand of a world called "the Academy", but has never been there, and the few details they've gathered are not conclusive enough to tell whether they mean the same Planet of College Girls she's been to. Still, Academy is admittedly a nicer name.

A few other tidbits of information sound useful to know: connecting to each new world costs more world-investment than the last, if you're not the special kind of Conduit that's good at wandering. She thinks she is probably not that kind. There is such a thing as a "Crown" you can have in only one world, and can't change worlds once you've got one, and it provides all kinds of benefits for that world in particular. She thinks she probably doesn't want one, but it's still good to know she has the option. You can mingle the powers of different worlds together to get something better than what you started with, but it costs the same kind of time investment that you'd use to connect to worlds and accept their powers, about a year's worth.

She gets to the end of the book and reads it over again from the beginning, looking for any more useful tidbits she might have missed the first time through. There are incomplete lists of powers offered by various worlds, but this traveler sampled worlds pretty shallowly, and apart from the ability to grow whole ecosystems in her Bevin and publish books to other people's libraries... well, no, in the privacy of her own cozy cave house she can admit that part of her kind of wants to publish books to other people's libraries. Wait, can she? The book doesn't mention it explicitly, but her dreams think that if she can receive publications she can also transmit them...

Leaving that aside—leaving that aside, she said—there isn't much here that's new to her among worlds she's actually encountered. Apparently some Conduits of the Prison can cultivate the trees and shape the stone, which sounds interesting but not familiar; her dreams, when she consults them, think she is as empty of the Prison as she is of the Academy. The traveler picked up nothing at all from Brazen, and from Arbor only the ability to drink starlight. Earth apparently grants powers, like the one for understanding language, but apart from that one and another one for touching bridges from afar, the traveler has mostly not gained any. Actually, touching bridges from afar sounds very useful. She could move so much more smoothly between worlds if she didn't need to walk for several hours to get between Arbor's bridges.

...hmm...

She chases down the thought, and blinks. Her dreams think she could make a bridge, from any of her worlds to any other. It takes a week, apparently, which is not wholly ideal. But it's something to keep in mind. For now, she's fine with walking. If she ever wants to get to a bridge that's more than a day's walk away, perhaps she will reconsider bridge construction.

She is not confident that this list is comprehensive, and she suspects it could be much better organized, but it's definitely a better list than she had before she wrote it. She tucks it into a desk drawer along with the traveler's journal.

Somehow, even though that wasn't exactly a comforting activity, it's still helped a lot with her mental state. She hardly feels at all like she had a sobbing breakdown an hour ago.

She heads out to the garden to check on all her plants. They're coming along nicely. That cherry tree branch is taking root with improbable speed; when she gives it a gentle wiggle, her gardener's instincts report that they're pretty sure it's been settling in for at least a few days. Some of the little metal sprouts in the sand garden are starting to make little metal buds that might soon become little metal flowers. The iron oak is putting out leaves like they're going out of style.

...looking at her garden makes her feel like it is worth it to not be a tree.

With renewed cheer and vigor, she wanders over to her bark stash and takes some of it to the kitchen island to fiddle with. She doesn't quite feel up to constructing a whole new skirt just to give it pockets, but perhaps she could manage some sort of belt with attached pouches, which would be useful if she ever encounters something she'd like to put in a pocket. Less useful for tucking her hands into as she walks, but you can't have everything.

Now where did that book on leatherworking run off to... right, there it is... and then if... hmm...

Triumph, success, pockets.

Now the question is—

Does she go back?

Having a sobbing breakdown because no one in the world will look at her is unpleasant, obviously. She didn't like doing it and she'd like to avoid doing it again.

But it's surprisingly survivable. Look at her, she survived it. She didn't even seriously consider doing otherwise. Her bones are all present and accounted for and she is not at all lying in the dirt waiting for new ones to wiggle into the shape of a body.

This seems to imply she could survive it again, if necessary.

She could take another semi-disposable book out to the gazebo and sit and read it. Or if there isn't enough light there to read after dark, she could just go for a walk in what is probably a poor excuse for starlight. There might be a moon, though. If there is a moon she could look at the moon.

She goes to the library, and gets an English-language book off the shelf, and puts it in her specific book-sized belt pouch that she made because she knows herself, and returns to the foyer to head back out. The book is called 101 Bad Jokes and she's morbidly curious how bad they are but doesn't expect to be disappointed if she has to wait a while to find out.

There is, indeed, a moon.

Looking up at it, she can't figure out if it looks like Earth's moon or not. Well, obviously there's a resemblance. But are all the splotchy bits in the right places? Maybe she could tell if she had a telescope, and also had paid more attention to the moon. It doesn't really matter that much. She just feels like being able to tell whether the moon looks the same as you're used to is an important skill for a traveler between worlds, and she's disappointing the person who wrote that travelogue by being so bad at it.

That is an objectively silly thing to worry about, and instead of worrying about it, how about she doesn't.

She makes that same hands-into-pockets motion again, and again encounters an absence of pockets, and laughs softly at herself, and steps out of the gazebo.

A hint of movement in the corner of her eye.

?

There's nothing there.

...?

...it's probably nothing. She keeps walking. The path is well lined with little garden lamps casting their light sideways across the gravel, so she's in no danger of tripping on an unseen obstacle. The air is crisp and the moon is beautiful.

She could keep doing this, she thinks. Even with the occasional sobbing breakdown when she gets caught out in the open at an unexpectedly crowded time. She could keep doing this, and in a year—well, more like two years, since she's still sleeping in her Bevin—she'll be able to gain her first power from this world, and a few more years after that, she'll have gained enough of them to feel at home here. If she manages to arrange good eavesdropping opportunities, she'll learn the language along the way.

It's nice to think about. There's definitely something more than a little scary about this plan of hers, but maybe she's okay with that. Maybe she wants to try doing things that are a little scary.

Is that a human shape, silhouetted against the lights out front of that dormitory?

No business of hers if it is.

Her steps do quicken for a moment, but the fact of the matter is that she's not really afraid of mysterious figures in the distance at night. Ordinary people up close in full daylight are the source of most problems in life.

Leaving the whole train of thought aside, she looks up at the moon again. It's pretty. She's glad there's a moon.

The moon is indifferent to her approval.

Fair enough.

She keeps walking. Idly, she reattunes her internal compass, seeking the nearest bridges to Brazen, the Prison, and Earth. Earth is closest, ahead-ish and off to the left, though still not as close as the bridge to Arbor behind her. Brazen feels quite a bit farther than that, mostly to her right and a little ahead. Her sense of the nearest bridge to the Prison is so faint she's not sure she isn't imagining it. Probably she isn't imagining it. It seems like it might be behind her, but she's not very confident of that.

...she isn't sure, new as she is to interpreting this sense, but she thinks the closest bridge to Brazen is significantly farther here than on the Arbor side. Maybe at some point she can walk to it and check. Something to do with her next outing here.

For now, she walks. She vaguely intends to go home either when she starts getting tired or when the walkways start flooding with students again. She isn't sure which will happen first.

...turns out it's the first thing, though the sky is noticeably lightening by the time she finds herself stifling a yawn. She returns to the gazebo for her future self's convenience, meditates (yawningly) through to her Bevin, and stumbles into bed with only a moderate amount of clothing-related awkwardness.

Some unknown but restful number of hours later, she wakes up and has a needlessly luxurious bath and gets dressed and trundles out to check on her garden, and finds that the metal flowers are putting out itty-bitty buds and the iron tree is nearly two feet high and the cherry branch is flourishing. It brings a smile to her face.

She puts her book of bad jokes back in her pocket, and returns to the bridge in the foyer, and realizes she's a little hungry, and detours to the kitchen to grab some bread, and returns to the bridge in the foyer again, and meditates through to the Academy.

White clouds puff along through a blue sky, offering occasional shelter from the bright afternoon sun. Just another idyllic day on the Planet of College Girls.

You know, among the many other things she's really looking forward to about eventually having a deep enough connection to this place, she thinks perhaps being able to properly enjoy the weather might be a big one. It's nice weather! But the constant unsettling feeling of emptiness really detracts.

Still. It's a pleasant afternoon and no one is currently around. She can wander around the environs of the gazebo, making sure to keep a line of retreat open at all times because she suspects afternoon on the College Planet is a time with a high risk of sudden floods of students.

No sudden floods of students yet.

But wait! Who's that mysterious shadowy figure?

Another one?

She squints.

It looks like... a person, just standing there, more indistinct than anyone should be under a sun this bright.

This is both moderately unsettling and really, really weird, and it's making her curious, and she actually starts to turn in that direction, and then she stops.

Because—no matter what the mystery of the shadowy figures is, she can't just go up and ask one about it now. They'll flinch away just like everyone else. She needs to wait several years before doing any such thing. The indistinct figure may look more approachable than the students, because the indistinct figure isn't flinching away yet, but that's no call to go asking for trouble.

...she does think, though, that she appreciates the existence of at least one person in this world who is capable of looking at her.

She makes sure not to go too close, and keeps strolling through the park until she has to hurry back to the gazebo because the students are coming.

Oddly, the students seem to stream around the indistinct figure without noticing that anyone is there at all.

That's so weird!!! Are they another Conduit?? No—she feels very sure that if they were another Conduit, she'd be able to tell. Her dream-instincts insist on that. This is some local phenomenon. Some maddeningly mysterious local phenomenon that she cannot investigate.

Well. She settles into the gazebo with her book.

Turns out: the jokes are bad.

It's kind of charming, though, to be reading through a book of bad jokes that told you upfront what to expect from it.

The chatter of the students as they flow past the gazebo is kind of nice to listen to now that she's mostly out of sight on a bench and no one is distressed by her presence. She thinks she could get used to this. She thinks this could be her life, for the next few years. Read her books, tend her garden, sit in the gazebo and walk along the paths and let herself absorb the Academy until it tolerates her. She thinks maybe that would be okay.

It's a wild and wonderful thing, almost beyond imagining, to look at the next few years of her life as she's planning to live them, and think that maybe they will be okay.