This door was supposed to lead to the hall closet with the cleaning supplies, but Bella doesn't see any good way to mop up spilled soup from the kitchen floor. "Extraplanar studies students," she mutters, stomping into the bar in her nice useful boots. If she takes notes on this place she can probably get extra credit somewhere for it. She goes up to the bar, and notes the lack of bartender. Maybe they stepped out for a minute.
"Thank you," he says, slowly. "Um. Are you the bartender?"
Bella is reading over Darren's shoulder. "Oh! Can I get a strawberry milkshake, if the first drink's free?"
Of course, says the napkin accompanying a strawberry milkshake. Bella collects it and sips through its straw.
"Mmmmmm."
"What can you tell us about how - evacuating me and possibly my parents to the science world would go?" Bella asks the bar.
If he holds the door for you, you may enter his world, and vice versa. The doors do not persist in the same places between uses, however, and I don't control when or where they reappear, so when you've left I cannot guarantee more chances.
"That rules out getting my parents, probably, I don't have a pocket mirror and I doubt I can get away with sitting in the hallway holding the closet door open while I wait for my parents to get all the way to MU anyway... and what about the science thing?"
I am afraid I have no special expertise on whether that will remain attached to you if you leave your home.
He sips his root beer float. Sip, sip.
Bella sighs.
"Yeah, me too. I don't want to wreck your nice science world. Mine's - okay, for everyday, anyway. I can work out my frustrations lucid-dreaming, that's safe as houses."
"Well - I say it's not magic because it doesn't ping magic-detection spells. It otherwise works a whole lot like a kind of magic. I can tell that you are a mind - so even if I just unexpectedly encountered you in deer form in the woods and you didn't say anything, I'd know you were a person - and if I try, I can - do things with that fact. But I'm not going to unless you want me to or attack me or something. And I can defend against other subtle artists who try to do things to me, and supposedly if I work really hard at it I have a little teekay potential I can train up. When I'm out of school I'm going to be a mental healer."
"Not necessarily trauma. People go to mental healers for fairly ordinary issues too, with mood or their interpersonal relationships or anxiety or things like that. But trauma too, sure."
"All therapists where I'm from are subtle artists, as far as I know. I suppose if you don't have them somebody has to do it."
"... Not-magic that conveniently works exactly like magic in every way, except for being sensed by other magic."
"I spend too much time around other subtle artists in my classes to let it go without nitpicking. I'll do the same thing if you call it 'psionics'."
"Psionics doesn't refer to anything other than subtle arts - except, sometimes, science fantasy versions of subtle arts - it's just another thing subtle artists nitpick."
"Huh. That's - kind of weird. Magic users from my world aren't picky at all about what they're called."
"Ehhh. Lots of contradictory stuff. Witches, wizards, oracles, rune-casters, sorcerers, arcanists, occultists, warlocks, shamans - it's really annoying, actually. This is what happens when you don't have a centralized school for magic, people call themselves all sorts of things."