Note to self: dancing on the ceiling has occasionally unpredictable consequences.

Jamie ‘falls’ into the formerly empty cell, a word which here means ‘twists around in a ludicrous act of agility and grace and lands with perfect poise into a vague defensive position’.

There is now a carrot in his hands. It’s also a knife.

It appears there's no one around to notice this.  The rhythmic clicking and whooshing of some sort of machinery can be heard from down the hall, as can what sounds like it might be occasional whimpers and hisses from someone in pain.

This is probably Alexander’s fault.

Growing anything interesting from wood alone is tricky, but he’s third circle and he knows his shit, he can manage.

A small, vividly purple mushroom sprouts from the bench over the course of about thirty seconds; he plucks it up, and taps it, once, twice, three times. It disappears in a puff of glittery magenta smoke and the scent of cinnamon; the smoke accumulates on the hinges of the door, for just a few seconds.

He opens the door, carrot still in hand, walks through, and closes it. It doesn’t make a sound. 

The magenta smoke dissipates.

He walks, casually, onto a wall, and then onto the ceiling of the hallway. He flattens himself against that ceiling, and starts creeping forward, silently, towards the source of noise.

Where he finds someone hooked up to a sinister-looking contraption of gears and pistons, eyes scrunched closed and breathing irregularly.  They're chained to an angled table and the device seems to be pulling some sort of glowy substance, in variously-sized and variously-hued orange particles, out of their chest.

Jamie’s really not being paid nearly enough for this bullshit.

Neither is the person on that slab, presumably.

He fiddles absently with one of his suspiciously floral necklaces, and jumps up from the ceiling; he ceases to be jumping and begins falling about halfway to the floor. He lands, crouched down, hardly making a sound.

He flicks a wooden bracelet with a rose growing out of it; it huffs, slightly, before obediently spitting out a small black cherry. That cherry proceeds to make rather more ominous ticking noises than any self-respecting and respectable cherry would ever dare to.

Hello, bizarrely inorganic machinery harvesting something or other out of a person. Have you ever met a cherry bomb? Now you have! Also you’re presumably broken in a dozen different ways, but, you know, you win some, you lose some.

The person startles violently at the explosion and stays flinched for several seconds.  When nothing else happens, they uncurl, gradually - from as much as they were able to shrink into themself in the restraints - and look over at Jamie.  They say a single syllable Jamie doesn't recognize, and then a couple more as an afterthought in between ragged breaths.

Good for them.

What even is that language. Is he even in the Empire. - he doesn’t have time to wait for them to rasp out some unrecognizable monologue.

He flicks out his carrot-knife, strides over to the angled table, and starts sawing at their chains. If they’re close to steel he’ll be able to cut through in a few seconds.

They are, it turns out, much stronger than steel!  But, as the person within them tries to indicate, at first with their still-unfamiliar words and then with their limited gestural ability, they're only bolted, not locked.  Impossible to escape from the inside, totally possible for literally anyone outside them to undo.

Once they have an arm free, they do a kind of hand dance and summon a ball of the glowy stuff, floating above their palm, hold it out to Jamie, and try to indicate he should poke it.

What sort of ridiculous design constraints could’ve possibly - 

... this random stranger sure has eaten some interesting mushrooms. 

You know what, sure, he has his trigger set up, he’ll poke the mysterious ball of light.

It explodes, harmlessly and sparkfully, out to a radius of a couple inches, where the pieces remain suspended a tick before swirling back into the skin of their caster's hand.  It doesn't feel like anything, and it has no other noticeable effects.

The stranger says something with a tone that suggests they expect to be comprehensible now.  They still aren't.

He’s still not being paid enough for this.

He removes the rest of their chains and taps his ear.

Confused stranger.

“I can’t understand you.”

Extremely confused stranger.

He points at them, and then points at the hallway he came from.

They heft themself off the table, walk out the door, and wait for him outside it.  They don't appear to be having balance issues or the like, but they do start trembling enough that it's visible from several feet away, which they resolutely ignore.

Fun. 

They can just... walk down that hallway, then.

Yup.  It's still deserted.  Quieter, without the machine; the only sound is the stranger's soft-but-not-silent footsteps.

How amateurish.

Although they were just being tortured, to be fair.

Jamie continues to hold his carrot-knife at ready. 

The stranger follows along for a bit, then abruptly stops, listens for a moment, and grabs Jamie's sleeve to pull him back the way they were going.

Still not getting paid enough for this.

Is this a ‘silently running at high speed’ sort of situation? This feels like a ‘silently running at high speed’ sort of situation.

The stranger doesn't seem to think so!  They keep it to a brisk walk.

- Jamie notices this, after a few seconds of running, and slows down such that they’re once again walking together, with the individual to be henceforth known as ‘ginger, concerning, and easily confused’ in the lead.

They continue to head that direction until they come to a fork, where they indicate to Jamie to wait a moment and draw a rectangle parallel to the floor in the air on their left side.  They point to Jamie and themself, then inside the rectangle.  After a brief pause, they hop their hand over the edge and set up their other hand as a landmark that the first one travels to and then flies sharply away up into the distance.  With a presentative motion, they group that all as one thing.

Then, they switch to their right side and set up a new rectangle and put Jamie and themself inside it again.  This time, they move their hand to a different part within the rectangle and mime hiding; with that established, they bounce back and forth narrowly with not-quite-crossed arms in the manner of a person waiting.  They set one hand flat and above their eye level and bring the other one up to meet it from below in slow increments while shooting out a few small sparks of the glowy stuff.  When their hands touch, they drop into a fighting stance and spray out more sparks at an imaginary enemy; this all gets grouped together with the same gesture the other side did.

It's all very flourishy, even with the shaking; they set themself evenly between these options and put their arms out in a sort of shrug (or perhaps they're imitating a balance scale) and start shifting between them while looking at Jamie questioningly.

This is such a ludicrously bizarre situation.

Jamie takes several moments to successfully parse this. He gestures at the left option.

They nod and start heading down the corridor they didn't come from the last time they were here.

They keep on leading the way, occasionally having to stop and puzzle out which path they should take next, occasionally hearing something and backtracking at a swift but reasonable pace, and once or twice, when a sudden noise loud and close enough that Jamie can hear it too happens, flinching sharply and taking a few shallow breaths before continuing on in the same direction and acting mostly as if it hadn't happened.

They come to a stairwell and go up four or five flights, where the decor switches from rough stone and torches to marble and carpets and natural lighting coming in through sheer purple curtains.  Everything's colored like it's night time, but it's not actually particularly dark; even someone with completely unaugmented vision would be able to navigate just fine, and probably even read normal-sized print.

After a few minutes of walking on this floor, the stranger turns a corner onto a balcony and, without ceremony, jumps off it.

Jamie has slightly enhanced vision, and not the kind that bothers behaving consistently; he doesn’t parse the lighting as particularly remarkable.

The aftereffects of gravity grapes and kitty carnation tea don’t quite suffice for arbitrary falls, but he can still manage a balcony.

The stranger is frowning at the moon - that's oddly featureful for a moon, and maybe too big for one too - the stranger is frowning at some prominent celestial body; once Jamie lands, they turn to him and sigh.

Jamie isn’t really in a great mood either. 

Does stranger mcstrangerson - the third - show any inclination towards... walking in a direction?

Not really; they seem to expect him to have some sort of plan.  But when it becomes clear that he doesn't, they start walking around the perimeter of the building until they find a semi-secluded nook with some sort of tall, grassy plant covering the ground.  They gesture to the corner and shrug at Jamie.

Sigh.

... that tall grassy plant is going to grow a puzzlingly kaleidoscopic blue grape, over the course of about twenty five seconds.

...Intrigued stranger.

He plucks it off the branch, delicately, and eats it.

His lips gradually fade from their ordinary, pleasant sort of pink, to a startling shade of blue.

He speaks, carefully, fluently, in whichever language insert-name-here expects to be spoken to in.

“Jamie Fragola, from the Land of Wine. Comprehension effect. Lasts hundred uninterrupted words, only once daily. Dropped near you by magic accident, in castle; heard, saw, rescued. Third circle witch, low experience. Mate at home, fucking asshole, power may stop any time. Don’t know where this, why this, how, how close home, how safe. Can grow fruit for indefinite language knowledge given eight hours, or use time as needed. Already have goblin agility, wall walk, darkness, evasion, other minor. Will understand hundred words of reply, then stop. Speak situation, means to reach safety, your powers, location, threat type, time, other?”

(His lips return to their ordinary color.)

"Lane, Alyssdianth village, Santhem.  Missing context, expect different worlds.  Previous translation attempt failed; unsure why.  Glitchy magic from transformation?  Not work extradimensional visitors?  In seven and third hours, near portal opens, stays several hours; go through, Santhem much safer.  Combat magic currently insufficient; big danger if noticed, captured: queen's mind slave, death.  Avoidable unless unlucky, glitch.  Create magic hiding place: invisible, inaudible - here, elsewhere?  Threats: patrolling beasts, my effects from partial transformation.  Rescue probably unnoticed yet, patrols light now, heavier near portal.  Can normally boost plant growth; unsure if yours; start indefinite comprehension anyway; communication helpful before Santhem.  ....Rescue: thanks."

Jamie nods.

A small sprout... sprouts... out of a nearby patch of ground, and starts to - almost inaudibly - babble to itself, in tongues unrecognizable.

The stranger - Lane, apparently - does a more extended, two-armed hand dance which produces a sphere of glowy stuff that expands to a radius of about six feet, the bottom third of which intersects the ground, then schwoops back into a manageable size and deposits itself back within them.  The corner looks no different than before, except that Jamie's plant is missing (and now entirely inaudible).  Lane walks into the area the sphere filled and disappears as they do so.

Is this latest act of magical derring-do going to work? Will our brave heroes succeed in their quest, or will their stars shine no more upon the porchlights and petunias of sunset avenue? Find out by tuning in tonight, live, to the new and improved PBS Kids network, featuring the amazing mister - oh whatever.

Jamie takes three steps forward, into the obfuscated area.

This seems to work; he sees his leg disappear as it crosses the threshold ahead of the rest of him and the associated footstep into the tall grass is silent.

Inside, the outside world is still visible through a semi-transparent orange shell, swirling gently with more yellow and more red variations on the color, and he can hear his plant again.  Lane's watching him to make sure he gets in okay and starts to lay down, curling up facing away from him, once they see that he has.

Jamie sits down and stares through the shell.

The plant grows; dozens of flowers bloom over the next few hours, speaking without mouths in strange synchronicity and cacophony, and some of them start to periodically murmur perfectly comprehensible snippets amongst all the incomprehensible blather.

"He really does adore you, you know, and don't you adore him? It's not like many other people have been all that interesting -"

"My lovely, I really have no idea whatsoever why the carriages are pumpkins. It's certainly a choice. Would you quite mind moving over here? I have an idea for how we might -"

"I'm, um, starting to get a sense of why mate-magic thought that they might be compatible -"

"My love -"

"My love -"

(Jamie doesn't react; they aren't comprehensible to him.)

(It's kind of ridiculously pretty outside the shell, especially the sky; there are more and more-aesthetic stars than he's used to.)

Jamie's plant acquires a second, smaller bubble, and then an additional glowy ball that from context is probably an attempted growth boost; it's not immediately clear whether it has any effect.  The larger bubble acquires a slightly more pensive Lane.

Lane acquires a deck of cards from an inner pocket of their vest, sorts two suits out of it and puts the rest aside, and attempts, by way of playing both sides and a lot of gesturing, to teach Jamie a very simple card game.

Jamie finds the sky interestingly foreign and otherwise entertains himself with unusually literal mental gymnastics.

... sure. He’s not sure how this person retained a pack of cards throughout this whole process, but... sure? 

Jamie has a perfect poker face and a reasonably refined sense of mathematics, and accordingly tends to win, when playing Bamboo Bazooka and Zucchini Zucchini Squash and other such card games. His performance in a charade conveyed game of chance might still be less than stellar. Oh well.

Once Jamie seems to have the hang of it, Lane adds in another two suits and things get a bit more interesting; once Jamie's mastered that they add the last two and it turns into an actually reasonably complex and fun card game, all things considered.

Outside, it gradually grows actually dark instead of just looking like it, but the bubble seems to handle its own internal lighting.  At one point, some sort of wolflike bipedal creature lumbers by in the distance and Lane grabs Jamie's hand worriedly as they watch it pass.

(It seems that Lane both apparently has claws and is not factoring in this piece of information as a criterion for determining how hard they should be clutching at him.)

Some of Jamie’s blood becomes external. 

Jamie has fairly strong preferences about the location of his blood! He hisses.

Lane jumps and scrambles backwards to the other side of the bubble, bumping against the inside of the shell.  Frozen there, they notice the blood on Jamie's hand and become a different shade of confused and alarmed; in looking around for the source they notice the blood on their hand and exude yet a third.

They stretch and close their hand in a slow fidget and - oh.  Claws?  What.

They spend a moment positioning their hand in different ways and watching the claws extend and retract, then look back up to Jamie and say what, from context and tone, can pretty much only be "Sorry.  Sorry sorry sorry."  As an explanatory afterthought, they add what he might or might not recognize as "....Transformation."

Jamie does not in fact recognize that word - Blueberries of Babel are traditionally used to exchange basic vocabulary, but he had a few other things on his mind at the time - but he gets the gist. 

The gibberish gorse temporarily ceases growing; a small succulent with an unusually autumnal color scheme starts slowly sprouting near the base of it.

”It’s fine.”

Lane nods, scooches back over to where they were previously sitting, and tentatively makes another glowy for Jamie to poke.

Will this one work? Probably not! Let’s find out.

Poke.

It sure doesn't.  Still doesn't feel like anything, either, when it bursts out like a spray of water droplets.  Lane doesn't seem deterred or for that matter surprised; they present him with another, slightly blobbier, one, sandwiched between their palms.

Poke poke.

This one does feel like something!  It gloms onto his hand, all smooth and warm and cool in different places, and does not explode.  Quickly enough, the area around his wounds becomes distractingly tingly, more attention-grabbing than the pain.

Lane seems to be concentrating pretty hard, but there's a note of satisfaction adorning their face.

... Jamie tentatively stops growing the bloodburro’s-tail in favor of the aforementioned gibberish gorse. And waits.

After a minute or two, during which the beast disappears around a distant corner without incident, the pain stops.  A moment later, the tingling does too and Lane draws back the goop; there's no blood left behind on his skin where it touched.

They take another look at their cards and put down a four of bats.

Yep, those sure were some interesting mushrooms.

The bloodburro’s tail unceremoniously withers away, and he puts down an equine five.

And they can continue passing the time this way until Jamie gets bored or something interrupts them.

How nice.

The gibberish gorse continues to grow, and grow, and not be particularly audible, and then -

A small salamander - half-succulent and half-animal, on closer inspection - flees the bubble around the gorse, squealing in some surreal and hideous mockery of an agonized human infant - or, possibly, just an authentic imitation of a mildly annoyed cat. It leaps towards Jamie’s face; his carrot-knife is out in a second, and the salamander impales itself on it, squirting some thick green syrup absolutely everywhere and spending a few seconds caterwauling in misery before finally giving in to the bittersweet caress of death.

... Jamie looks at Lane.

Lane looks at Jamie! (From the other side of the bubble, where they are working on stopping hyperventilating.)

Jamie can’t really ask whether salamander goblins are common in the area without - 

He can feel the gibberish gorse finish growing; he shakes the salamander off of his carrot knife, and leans into the bubble containing it; it’s grown into a vividly green bush with sharpened spines for leaves, and dozens of toxic yellow flowers, each with a wiggling herbaceous tongue waggling around. 

They all talk over each other.

”Your father never -“ “the world will end in -“ “we love you, Jamie, please don’t -“ “which way is it to -“ “do you know the seven names of the dragons, love? -“ “I’ll kill you! I’ll fucking kill you you fucking! -“ “blah, blah, blah blah -“ “for my dinner I’d like the salad, yes I know I -“

He identifies the leading flower of the pack, wipes away salamander too from his hands, and plucks out its tongue, carefully avoiding the bristling spikes; the other flowers fall silent. He eats the tongue; the bush peels itself apart from the inside out, layer by layer, until nothing remains but a faint yellow dust.

He leans back into the main bubble.

”You okay?”

They give a mirthless laugh through a few deep breaths.  "On what scale?  Probably 'no' on most of them, but not in a particularly actionable way - hi!  You speak Lyssdianth now; how delightful.  What was that.  - I have so many questions and I'm sure you do too, but why not start there."

“I take it that the salamander isn’t just a common goblin here, then. It was a goblin. It seemed succulent based. It was plausibly attracted by the gibberish gorse, or might’ve been created by the gibberish gorse interacting with some of your magic - what even is going on with your magic, do you just pick fights with trees off the side of the road and get improbably lucky or are you a witch.”

"I - yes, I'm a witch.  Or was.  Or something.  Why are those the two options you're thinking of - and what do you mean by goblin."

“Miscellaneous critters on a scale from ‘talking pitcher plant’ to ‘flytrap dragon’. Are your magical powers not in fact derived from goblin fruit or heartfruit trees in any way.”

"Yes; I don't know what those are.  Different worlds, as I said."

“I didn’t immediately abandon all of my assumptions upon hearing that. You do still have air. And language. And hands. How does your magic work?”

"I mean, you've seen the gist of it; I have a soul, sometimes I put some of it outside of my body for a bit and have it do things.  - Rather, I have, hm, about two-thirds of a soul, now, I suppose.  How's yours work; what're those terms you mentioned."

Jamie is simultaneously glad that they didn’t make a sarcastic comment about the ‘hands’ bit, and vaguely disappointed.

“From an inside perspective that probably seems sane.

Witches are born from the deaths of heartfruit trees; heartfruit trees are where babies come from, witches are people who can grow goblin fruit, goblin fruit does magic and can grant lasting magical properties, goblins are magic, goblin fruit and goblins also grow in the wild, witches are arguably themselves goblins. There are also vampires. They have traits. They probably won’t come up, except insofar as there’s one back home, my asshole mate, who might prevent me from growing goblin fruit at any time.” 

"Right back at you with the 'that probably seems sane' - sorry about your mate, that sounds rough - baby whats."

“... people.”

" - People?  Weird.  Not the weirdest thing about this, I'll grant you, but....baby people.  How does that even work."

“They’re small, fragile, fully dependent humanoids with differing body ratios, comparable to the difference between puppies and adult dogs, and they gradually gain sapience and experience over time. Do you spontaneously appear as adults.”

"You are once again using a term that applies exclusively to animals.

"Sometimes, somebody new walks into town.  She doesn't have memories going much earlier than that; she might have some luggage.  She might gradually grow taller and more generally capable and somewhat differently proportioned, over a few months or years or octades, or she might start that way, or she might stay smallish.  I'm about at the upper end of that," they say, gesturing to themself; they look to be around sixteen or seventeen, "and you're even closer."

(Jamie's comprehension effect will note that the pronoun Lane's using is both feminine and the only one available to refer to humanlike people.)

" - Although I guess there's Lady Arteinal, the previously-mentioned queen; she's taller than any of us and I guess you could probably extrapolate that she's the thing you're referring to."

Linguistic genders are weird and referring to all people in the feminine isn’t especially stranger than having a specific gender for bark; he doesn’t register it as all that notable.

He continues brushing salamander gunk off of his clothing.

“I find that very deeply strange. That isn’t surprising. Does this only happen in one specific town, or do arbitrary urban areas count?“

"Oh, do you have more than one?"

He’s just. He’s just done. His internal monologue can’t even come up with a snappy response to that.

“The empire has over a hundred million people in it.”

"Wow-ee.  Is that - have you figured out how to communicate between separate areas, or can you just go a really long way?"

“Could you disentangle what you mean specifically by ‘areas’, and what your impediments to communication and travel typically are. We generally use goblin fruit for both but there are also other methods.”

"Well, if you act on a vague intention to walk away from the village, you generally decide to come back at some point.  If you're determined to get as far away as possible, you might get lost and find yourself back in somebody's orchard on the outskirts.  If you've got a really good sense of direction, you'll probably run into some beasts that'll non-obviously but consistently herd you back.  And if you're very determined to go exploring, and you're paying very careful attention to what direction you're going, and you got a couple of your friends to go attack the beasts in the other direction so they can't spare any to send after you, or if you've got the firepower to take them down yourself, you wake up at home in your bed with memories that get increasingly fuzzy from when you set out."

“This really sounds less like ‘you only have one town, and don’t have any children’ and more like ‘someone is luring people of a particular age in, wiping their memories, and preventing them from leaving’.”

"Yes.  I mean, I'm not entirely sold on baby people, but we've figured something along those lines for a while.  I always thought it was Lady Arteinal behind it but she was monologuing at me about how she was going to 'break our chains' and 'free us from our edenic prison' while she strapped me down.  Great concept; can't say I'm a particular fan of her methods.  But I'm glad most places aren't so isolated."

“For reference, I currently consider it likely that the people being trapped in your town are being exposed to a very particular set of plants, such that you’re not actually running on a different magic system. It also seems likely that I’m still in my own world. Any chance that the portal leading out of here doesn’t lead to the one town?”

"Well.  It leads to the forest outside the one town."

“Are there any portals that don’t lead to quote unquote edenic prisons. That’s mostly a rhetorical question. Do we have any other options.”

"If there are I don't know about them; I've never been to the moon before."

“Fuck.”

"If you really wanted, we could in fact stay here.  - We've been waiting for long enough that I think I can write off the possibility of my magic refilling all the way ever again, so I'm going to be rather handicapped in the combat department, but you seem to've got some skills there yourself and the fact that there's two of us is a literally unprecedented advantage.  - On the other hand.  Possibly I should be worrying about - other side effects."

“You did accidentally stab me. With your hand. And react to a salamander like it was Barbara the Destroyer in a fancy hat.”

"Not actually what I was referring to.  The claws are new; so's the hearing - about conversational level is the same, but I can catch things that would've been too quiet before - I've been able to hear your heartbeat this whole time, for example, it's very distracting - and loud things are much moreso, and worse when they're startling.  And I expect there's probably some tendency to panic on top of that just from, you know, the general experience here.

"But - when girls go to the moon, it's with the intention of disabling some of the queen's power source and buying the rest of us planetside a bit of a reprieve in the frequency and power of beast attacks.  Sometimes this works, and she comes back triumphant, and sometimes it works and she doesn't.  And sometimes, it doesn't work at all, and in a few weeks we get attacked by an unusually powerful, vaguely humanoid beast that usually manages to severely injure at least one witch or a couple farmers before everyone's collective efforts can take him down.

"Without the context I've now got, it was plausible that the queen made those from the power she harvested from captured witches.  Now it's pretty clear she makes them directly from the witches themselves, and I'm not sure where in the process the bit where I decide to start serving her ends and attack everyone I've ever loved happens, or whether it already has.  I don't know if it's safe for me to go home but on some thought I'm pretty certain I don't want to give her any more of a chance to deliver me orders than I have to."

“- could you give me a more detailed portrait of this person’s motivations.”

"Insofar as I know them - she probably has the capability to destroy us all, but hasn't.  She controls the beasts, possibly imperfectly.  She stays on the moon almost always; I hadn't seen her before I came here and we - collectively, this was before my time - didn't know she existed until the first witch came through the portal and back.  She's been around longer than anyone still in the village except a few farmers.  She frequently sends small attacks of beasts to destroy crops or agitate livestock or harass people, and less frequently sends larger ones that do more harm.  She seemed - fond, in a very condescending way, of me, in a way that didn't seem unique to my specifics - I think she viewed me and the rest of the witches she's got ahold of as a pitiable but necessary sacrifice.  If she becomes aware I'm missing, I'd expect her to attempt to recapture me, and if she learns of your presence here I'd expect her to want to get you too, and would probably use me to do it if she has the ability.  I don't know what she'd do with you if she managed it.

"- Those were more descriptions of her actions than her motivations, but I think any conjectures on the latter I'd make would be at best shaky."

If this person is self-admittedly likely to be compromised, and the enemy is capable of memory manipulation, his reaction to the thought ‘this whole situation doesn’t make any sense’ should probably be ‘then maybe it isn’t true’.

He probably shouldn’t let on to this.

“Did she strike you as behaving basically rationally in pursuit of her unknown goals, insofar as rationality can include... that, or did she seem outright unhinged.”

"The former, I suppose.  She has been doing basically the same sorts of things for - you keep using decimal - almost a century now, in a way that to me suggests she can stick to a plan and isn't just messing with us on her whimsy.  - Also, can you grow just plain food; I left home more than a day ago - maybe two - and haven't exactly eaten regularly while I've been here."

“Would you settle for something supernaturally nutritious.”

"I would."

Thirty seconds pass.

Chocolate glazed strawberries in the shape of donuts are apparently delicious. Om nom.

Om nom indeed.

"Thanks much.  I know what chocolate is but haven't encountered whatever's underneath it; don't know which side you'd count that for on the question of whether this is a different universe.  It's quite good, though.  - And that reminds me, I think I figured out why you were making my magic act flaky earlier."

“I’m named after it; it’s a strawberry. Oh?”

(They mouth 'straw berry' as separate words under their breath somewhat confusedly.)

"Well, all the things that've worked have been things I did directly and by myself, and the things that didn't were the ones where I would've been nudging your soul into doing it for me.  So you must just not have a soul, I think, or if you do it's not made of lyss or something lyss can interface with."

“I do in fact have a soul.”

"What's it like?"

“- heartfruit trees live for sixty six years. They steadily produce baby people during that time. After sixty six years pass, they die. Inside their stump, there’s a witch, with the soul of that heartfruit tree in them. It’s ambiguous whether non-witches have souls, but witches do in fact have a separate metaphysical organ that does magic and persists after death, or with the removal of a heart, and it’s also clear that we run at least some of our cognition on it.

It sounds like you have an unrelated metaphysical organ situation that may or may not have most of those traits and may or may not be the result of magical kumquats or something.”

"I'm aware that I'm not exactly well-positioned to evaluate whether we're from different universes, but I'd like to register that it feels like if we were from the same one the things you keep saying would seem at all sane.  What are hearts for you guys; I'm betting those are also unrelated."

“Thing inside your chest that goes beat beat beat? Most people’s tether to sapience. Necessary source of vampiric yum yums. Red. Heart shaped.”

"How could a heart not be heart shaped - I don't think we know whether ours are tied to sapience per se, but we'd probably die if ours stopped working.  Possibly you should explain vampires."

“It’s been a day.

If you take the heart of an ordinary person, they’re a zombie. Completely obedient, vaguely dead, moderately useful to a certain kind of person. If you take the heart of a witch, they become a vampire instead, since they still have a soul; vampires are mostly like witches, but they need to connect with other people’s hearts to stay sane, and they mostly do that by drinking blood and having sex. Vampires can also have mates; they imprint on the heart of a witch, fall in love, and thereafter have primary command over that witch’s magic as well as their own. They also have fangs.”

"It sounds kind of like your farmers' hearts are somewhat like our witches' souls, then, given - what I've learned here.  It's hard to know what our hearts do but I don't think it's that.  Also, people - or Lyssdians, rather; apparently your kind does - don't have blood; I'm assuming now that that was the red liquid you leaked when I, er, stabbed you?  And for context, a vampire, as the word is normally used, is a kind of beast that attempts to extract and collect people's lyss.  They have fangs, too, which isn't especially unusual for beasts, but they use them more than their claws, which is, a bit."

“The gibberish gorse sure did decide on some translation conventions. Is ‘farmer’ more than just a profession, here, non-witches do a wide variety of things.”

"It's the word for all non-witches, yes.  They're also much stronger and harder to injure and tend to be built differently: frequently taller and almost always broader than I am.  They do things other than farming, but still generally physical activities - it makes sense you'd have them doing more, since they're almost all of your population?  We're about half and half.  - Well, I say 'about', it's usually pretty exact."

“Witches and non-witches of my kind don’t have any baseline physical differences.”

"Hm," they acknowledge.

"Well, I've had a bit of time to digest your chocolate straw berry; we should probably discuss when you want to make a break for the portal.  I'd expect the longer we wait for it, the higher the chance they notice I'm missing and the more likely it is we encounter trouble on the way there, but I'm not terribly eager to get going if you can think of anything else we should cover."

(- should he offer to make this person a quick suicide trigger? He probably can’t do that without strongly implying that he has a suicide trigger and strongly implying which conditions might set it off. He doesn’t especially want to imply either of those things. Damn.)

“I don’t think there’s anything I want to grow before we head out, given time constraints- ” and the fact that you’re potentially compromised, he does not say “-and it sounds like ‘go somewhere other than the portal’ isn’t tenable. We can head out now. I’ll follow your lead.”

"Some basic strategy first - you listed individual powers you already had, earlier, and I think evasion was one of them; what does that mean specifically and is it applicable here."

“People who attempt to injure me generally fail. I’m not sure I feel comfortable specifying in more detail.”

"Understandable.  Anything else that might be useful?  - Basically, we need to get around to the other side of the building and cross an open field without getting captured, which'll be much easier with stealth than with open combat.  I can do personal shields that decrease noticeability and those are pretty good but won't help in the event that we do get noticed, and they're somewhat draining.  Also, I should mention that the portal leads to a building that's itself safe, but there are beasts in the woods outside it, albeit ones much weaker and - less coordinated, than those here."

“I am in general very good at stabbing things but I’m not sure how I stack up here. If I ever need to suddenly and uncontrollably fling myself into the air with gravity I can. I have a cherry bomb left for the day. They explode. Nothing else comes to mind.”

"All right.  Meeting you has been a strict improvement over not having done that.  I don't expect the reverse to be true."

And with that, they hand-dance each of them a tall oblong bubble.  Lane's looks shimmery to Jamie but presumably this wouldn't be true if he hadn't already been aware of them; his own is almost entirely transparent from the inside.

"Lead with your fingertips to go through the bubble instead of bouncing off it," they say, and extend their arm, and walk outside.

Jamie follows in the manner recommended.

And so the two of them can make their way around the perimeter.

Beasts come into view before the portal does; Lane slows down a bit and is obviously intentionally controlling their breathing but keeps on.  The shields seem to be doing their job.

Eventually, they round a corner and a stone-and-copper building of sorts, with something emitting a fair bit of purple light from the inside, comes into view.

There's a paved path going from it to the castle that they're approaching from the side, encompassing the entirety of the smaller building's open doorway.  When Lane steps on it, it makes a piercing shing! and a bright flash of light, and all the beasts, the closest of which is about thirty yards away, snap their heads towards the both of them.

Jamie has learned a valuable lesson about running before his native guide indicates he strictly ought to! He remains still. For now. He’s very ready to stab things.

His native guide is kind of busy panicking.  The beasts don't rush them right away - they howl, haunting and loud, even to Jamie's relatively non-augmented ears, and Lane rises, and -

- perhaps it would be healthiest to stop thinking of them as his native guide for the moment.

That just figures, doesn’t it. 

Jamie is extraordinarily agile, as weightless as he wants to be, and something about the air around him seems to make people and projectiles inclined to slide away just shy of him rather than directly connecting. He can probably make it to the portal building - looking less like a person and more like a vaguely humanoid gust of wind - without having to do much stabbing.

He is in fact also very good at stabbing, if that comes up.

He might have to do a little stabbing, yeah, or at least slashing.

Lane bleeds purple glowy stuff, apparently; it floats in ribbons behind them as they chase Jamie toward the portal.

Going through the portal from his dorm to the castle felt relatively seamless, apart from the shift in gravity.  This one - doesn't; Jamie's left disoriented and unable to process input from his senses for several moments before his brain catches up.  By the time it does, Lane's rushed through the portal, come to a stumbling stop, acquired an expression best described as 'horrified', slumped against a wall, and started crying into their knees.

(They're bleeding, still, but it's orange now, with a sharp gradient between that and where it was coming out purple.)

God he fucking hates this fucking day.

He watches, carrot knife at the ready.

Lane doesn't seem to be having a super great time of it either, honestly.  In fact, if uninterrupted, they're just going to sit here crying for several minutes.

He tries discretely growing a self tying vine, in a corner, so he can restrain them if he needs to. It doesn’t grow. This isn’t very surprising; Alexander was never going to refrain from tying up his magic for very long.

He keeps his knife readied in their direction, insofar as he can, and peers very carefully outside the narrow where-they-are for a look at the broader where-they-are.

They're in a forest; it's night.

Before he can take in much more detail than that, a beast, somewhat but not much smaller than the ones on the moon, springs from outside his field of vision to uncomfortably close to him.  Snarling, it bounces off the open doorway, twice, with a flash of light where it hits, and falls back a few paces, watching Jamie with a constant low growl.

Shadows move behind it, and it might not be the only thing growling.

Sigh.

He closes the door and waits for Lane to gain some level of coherence.

With the door closed, the only light sources are the portal and Lane's lyss, trailing gently out of their arm before forming globules and hanging in the air.  It's rather pretty, ignoring the context.

Lane's weeping eventually abates to occasional sniffles; they wipe their eyes and take a deep breath.  When they finally look up, they flinch a bit and drop their gaze again upon making eye contact with him.

After a frozen moment, they procure a roll of bandages from their vest and start dressing their wound.

“I get the broad gist of what just happened. Could you lay it out in more detail.”

"I - "  Their voice cracks; they clear their throat.  "I....remember it?  It was me doing it, not, being stuck in my head while something else puppeted my body or anything.  - Well, for a definition of 'me' that accounts for suddenly developing a different personality and entirely opposite goals.  It's - I don't know; do you have something more specific to ask; it's hard to guess what sort of information you're looking for.  Hard to think clearly at all, maybe."

“Do you have a sense of how likely it is to have a repeat showing in the next hour.”

"No.  - Maybe.  It was definitely the howling that did it, right, and it wasn't just the noise; there was some sort of magical resonance going on.  And I got information out of it - not like with language, just - on its own.  So I think the riskiest times are going to be either the next time some beasts notice me, if they do it again, or - normally, if you're awake, you can hear them howling every night out in the woods, at exactly midnight.  Which seems probably relevant now, only I have absolutely no idea what time it is; did you happen to see the moon when you looked out there.  - Or possibly whatever it is already had permanent effects, in which case we're basically screwed, although if that's the case I don't know why it would have let up at precisely the instant I went through the portal."

Jamie considers mentioning that he’s currently cut off from his magic. He decides against it.

”I didn’t see the moon. What’s our next step.”

"I'd really like to get back to my house and go to bed, personally.  Probably that should be preceded by - me heading outside, you closing the door, and waiting to see if howling occurs.  Come help me fight them if it doesn't.  If it does....beasts in general are ground-bound, the ex-witch ones float a few feet off the ground but I don't think they can properly fly; if you can get to the treetops you should be able to avoid them and navigate to town all right.  You should be at least more safe there, and you can wake someone up to help you.  - It's vaguely in the direction of out the door."

“Okay. Do you want to do anything else before we implement that.”

"I should probably - " and they start poking and absorbing the floating lyss until only one medium-sized blob's left to light the area near the doorway.

"Anything else from you?"

“No.”

"Okiedokes."

They get in position by the door and rush through it when Jamie opens it.

There's no howling, nor the sounds of combat.

"Uhh," says Lane.

“Do I open the door.”

They make an indecisive noise.  "....Sure, they aren't attacking.  I guess they might start if you come out."

He updates certain probability estimates.

He opens the door and refrains from walking through it, knife at the ready, discretely pointed in the direction of Lane’s voice.

They're just sort of standing there awkwardly.  The four visible beasts look at Jamie, almost curiously, and back to Lane.  And it is to rather than at, they seem to be expecting Lane to give them some sort of direction.  Lane looks distinctly uncomfortable and uncertain about what to do.

"It's about 2:00 am, looks like," they say, their eyes flicking to the sky.  "So, best case, we have almost a full day to figure something out.  - Well, best case is nothing happens at all and I'm fine forever, but.  Best plausible case."

“Tell them to leave?”

"They don't...language.  I guess I could - I'll try and charades it.  Stars I hate this.  Do you want me to attempt to get them to stay somewhere and then come back for you or should we make our ways into town separately."

“First one.”

"Okay, I'll be back, uh, sometime."

They walk out of the clearing and, after a bit of whistling and a lot of gesturing, get the beasts to follow them.

Jamie stands there and waits. And periodically tries growing something, to no particular avail.

It takes about twenty minutes for Lane to get back.

"I think I lost them.  Don't hear them following me, in any case."

“Mmhm.”

... he takes a single step outside the door frame.

Lane starts walking away from him, presumably towards town.

Meh, even if it is a trap he can probably manage.

He follows. 

Nothing immediately jumps out to attack him.

It's another hour or so to Lane's house, with occasional detours to stay out of the way of something they hear.  The forest is quite dense outside of the clearing, to start with, but it lightens up as they go on until it becomes open fields and orchards, then a road - first dirt, then paved in stones - lined with the occasional house or barn.

The town is completely empty of people as they enter, which is probably to be expected for one of this size at this hour; there are a few bats flying their irregular patterns overhead and a cat or two watching from the shadows.

Lane doesn't say a word till they're standing in front of what is presumably their door - yes, there's an engraved wood sign hung on the wall next to it reading 'Emilane'.

"Well.  Here we are."

“Are there other people who can be woken up.”

"Hypothetically.  What for."

“I don’t love the idea of being alone, in an enclosed space, with someone who might experience mind control at any moment.”

"That's pretty reasonable."  They sigh and run a hand through their hair.  "I was going to drug myself; I have something to knock a person flat for long enough you'd be able to get a full sleep in without a chance of me....interrupting.  Dosing's the same on it for Lyssdians as beasts, by weight, so I wouldn't expect anything weird from - me maybe being both.  I," they scrunch their eyes closed.  "I want to do the right thing here, the safe thing.  And I also would quite like to avoid talking to anyone else before morning, if that can be done within those constraints."

“So there are three major possibilities here. Either you’re wrong about how your drug interacts with uncharted medical space and you kill me in my sleep, or you have to talk to someone else and hand me over. Or neither of those things happen. Can you see why I’m weighing those options like I am.”

"Yeah.  Yeah.  I'm pretty sure I wouldn't kill you, just try and drag you back through the portal - that's not actually reassuring, given that I have drugs.  Never mind.  Do - what if....what if I go inside, you wait out here, I grab the wakeravel, I go sleep in - somebody's - barn, you take my house."

“There’s not really anything stopping you from walking in after me, or entering the house while I’m sleeping. I can’t actually verify how many keys or side entrances you have. Do you want me to wake up someone random while you wait in the bushes.”

"Oh, would you?  - Probably not somebody random, but yes; that'd be brilliant.  ....Also I don't know what you mean about keys but that's probably beside the point."

“Do you not have - nevermind. Point me at a house.”

"You probably want a farmer, given that I was," fidgety claw-flex, "going for physical attacks, before.  And probably don't have magical ones yet.  - They all live a bit out of town; do you have brooms?  Can you ride one?"

“- do your brooms grow on hackberry trees.”

"Some of them?"

“Probably not the same thing, I might not be able to ride it.”

"Do you want to try or should we start walking."

“Second one.”

"Okay."  Lane starts to go for the one leaning against the house anyway, but stops.  They start walking back in the direction they came into town from.

Walking, walking, walking, oh wow this is so exciting and interesting except for how it isn’t, walking, walking, walking, at least the scenery is kind of novel, walking, walking, walking.

And after ten or fifteen minutes they turn off the road and into the yard of a little farmhouse, or rather, it actually seems bigger than most of the ones they've passed, but none of them are particularly expansive.  Lane stops a fair distance from the door, inhales to start saying something -

- and is interrupted by a voice from behind them both.

"Emilane.  Whoever-you-are."  A greeting, from the - probably a farmer, based on Lane's previous description - sitting sidesaddle and oh-so-casually on a broomstick, her feet a few inches off the ground.

(Lane, perhaps predictably, startles violently at the broken silence.)

Is this person planning on murdering them. He’s going to be really annoyed if this person is planning on murdering them. They probably aren’t but it’s been a day.

“Could you rank your current desire to commit homicide on a scale from one to ten, I’m not in the mood to guess.”

"Zero."

“Great. The person I’m standing next to recently experienced mind control and might resume being mind controlled at any time, watch out for that. I’m Jamie.”

"Fabulous.  What are you doing in my yard."

"She needs somewhere to spend the night, can't use my place since.  Aforementioned mind control."

"Why aren't you sending her to one of the empty cottages.  And how are you even here?"

"She's not new, Vern, she's from a different world -"

"You lost the right to 'Vern' me."

Lane sighs.

"She's an extradimensional visitor, Overnya.  And since aforementioned mind control, we thought she could use some backup, in case I decide to drag her back to the moon for Lady Arteinal to vivisect for her magic system."

"That still doesn't explain how you're here."

"She rescued me."

Vern looks to Jamie for confirmation.

Jamie just. Isn’t going to address the pronoun thing, it’s probably a translation error.

”Yep.”

"Fine.  I'll take her; what are you doing."

"Going back to my place, wakeraveling enough to - be sure I get a full rest."

"What, and if you get zapped on the way there you just....?  Rampage all over town?"

"It's been a long couple of days -"

"Yeah, I'm sure it has been - it has for me too, Emilane, you could've given me some fucking warning - you could've said goodbye - I had to fend off a swarm of vampire fruit bat beasts, y'know, and I kept pinging you and you didn't show - eventually I brought in Kal, but not before they got a quarter of the western orchard -"

"What, don't you have anything to say for yourself?"

"....You're the worst."

She closes the distance between them, still on the broom, and gives Lane a light shove on the shoulder - an expression of frustration more than an attack.

Lane goes down anyway.  It's hard to say whether they're tired and weak enough that the tap was sufficient or if they do it on purpose.  Either way, they don't immediately get back up.

"I'm going to ping Kal, and she's going to watch your sig go to your house, and ward you inside it.  I'll see you tomorrow."

They give a minute head gesture, probably meant to be a nod.

She turns to Jamie.  "All right, I'm sure you're tired too.  Let's get you to bed," she says, and starts floating towards the house.

Jamie follows.

”Do you always assault the recently traumatized, unprovoked, or is that more of a special occasions thing.”

"That's....not...what happened?"

“I don’t know whether ‘assault’ is translating strangely, but the meaning on my end is ‘making someone reasonably and immediately afraid that they might face significant physical harm’. And that standard is higher when the someone‘s been recently tortured. And ‘shoving someone while you‘re airborne and they aren’t’ would count anyways.”

" - Tortured?"

“They weren’t having a great time.“

She doesn't have an immediate response to that, and then they're at the house anyway.  She dismounts her broomstick, leans it against the exterior wall, and holds the door open for Jamie.

The inside, which lights up as they enter, is exceedingly quaint.  There are quilted wall-hangings and embroidered hand towels, vases setting on doilies filled with - are those literally just stalks of grain?  They might be.

Leading Jamie to the bedroom, Vern gestures to a particular drawer and says, "Pajamas are in here; might be a bit big but what can you do.  - Do you need a shower?  Something to eat?"

“I can sleep in the nude, if that’s not against custom. I don’t need to eat, I do need to shower.”

"How about you just borrow the pajamas.  Bathroom's that door," she says, gesturing, and walks to the kitchen table to start writing something down.

He goes into the bathroom, finds it disturbingly inorganic but ultimately workable, and showers.

He locates a bed, double checks whether he can access his magic - nope, still not happening, great fucking goblin gods he is going to fucking murder Alexander and then murder him again when he grows back - and then he goes to bed.

If anything happens to or around him while he’s sleeping, anything is going to discover that having the carrot knife under his pillow shoved down anything’s throat does not in fact improve anything’s stock of beta carotene, and in fact rapidly reduces anything’s ability to live.

No anythings enter his room while he's asleep.

Most of the way through his sleep cycle, there's the sound of someone entering the house and moving around.  The shower starts, and a bit after that, singing.  It's plausibly Vern's voice, quiet enough that she could be forgiven for doing it with a guest sleeping in her house.  It's also - kind of amazing.  Whether she's literally the best he's ever heard may be up for debate, but she's certainly up there.

After that are kitchen noises, some silence, additional kitchen noises; someone padding to just outside his closed door, and a quiet "...Jamie?  Breakfast."

- the Empire has people who are better at singing, but it also only recently invented four part harmonies and he’s never heard anyone nearly as technically competent. He’s delighted, even though it and the miscellaneous rustling disrupted his ability to sleep.

”I’ll be out shortly,” he says, sounding slightly less monotonous than usual.

"'Kay."  Pad pad pad back to the kitchen.

And after a few minutes he, too, is in the kitchen, wearing the same clothing as yesterday, restraining the urge to slink in whilst brandishing a weapon.

"Did you want to borrow some clothes."

“No. - can you give me a paragraph’s summary of your world, I don’t know whether my initial contact was relevantly compromised on the basics.”

She hands him an unfamiliar pastry - a bready circle, folded in half around some sort of filling, looks like.  "Sure.  Do you want to try brooms now that it's daylight, because if not we can eat and talk on the way to Lane's.   - Emilane's."

“Let’s walk.”

Out the door she goes, her own pastry in hand.

"Okay, so, farmers live outside the village, and take care of crops, which are plants you can grow a lot of and are useful for stuff, and livestock, which are animals that can do useful work or grow things useful things from their bodies.  Witches live in town and make or do magic-y things and some of them garden or keep pets, which is like farming but easier.  Sometimes a farmer and a witch form a really deep friendship and their souls attune and they can do extra things with each other that people who don't have that can't."

(The filling is some sort of squash, apparently. Both it and the exterior are somewhere between sweet and savory, not quite hitting either.  It's mediocre.)

“- that’s helpful. Does your world consist of exactly one town which is impossible to leave. Do people spontaneously appear, rather than being grown. Is Lady Arteinal a real and terrible person.”

" - We're literally not in town right now?"

“Do you have exactly one major population center, which you are incapable of successfully going indefinitely far away from, for inexplicable reasons.”

"I've never like, tried, but I guess."

“And people spontaneously appear without having to grow on trees first, and Lady Arteinal is a real and terrible person.”

"Mmyah. 

" - Wait, on trees?  Are you a fruit?  - I mean I guess we could do that first if it was really fast where nobody could see.  Kal thinks we 'coalesce out of the ambient magic that flows through the air and every living and unliving thing that surrounds us', but I think she's full of fertilizer and doesn't know what she's talking about."

“I wouldn’t call myself a fruit, although if I felt insensitive I could say there were a few in my dorm. Although my last name does mean ‘strawberry’. Is Lady Arteinal a real and terrible person.”

"I said 'mmyah'."

This person is very thoroughly mediocre at communicating clearly with people from different cultural backgrounds.

”Mmhm.”

"Yeah so, I mean I guess Kal might be right, but the way she says it is so - "

Vern carries on being very thoroughly mediocre at communicating clearly with people from different cultural backgrounds for the rest of the walk, but in a way that doesn't require - or allow, really, unless Jamie wants to put quite a lot of effort into interrupting - responses more specific than the occasional nod or 'mmhm'.

The walk is nicer when it's light out; it's a beautiful, crisp-but-not-chilly autumn day.  They pass people harvesting the fields and eventually make their way into town, where there are more but still not very many people, chatting excitedly in small groups or reading a book on a bench next to a tree or braiding each other's hair.  The architecture is almost unbearably cozy and the foliage on the well-placed trees is impressively pretty for seeming to come from entirely ordinary plants.

Jamie might notice that he hasn't seen a single boy, or man, or for that matter anyone more androgynous than Lane.  Or younger than twelve, or older than about eighteen.

Yeah this is really intensely creepy in context and he doesn’t like it at all.

They arrive back at Lane's house.  Vern pulls a rope which rings a bell somewhere inside the house, waits about three seconds, and marches in.

Jamie follows.

She goes into what is presumably Lane's room, given that it contains a bed with Lane on it.

They're not lying down, but neither is 'sitting up' quite accurate; their legs are under the covers but their top half looks like they were leaning against the headboard and just sort of slid against the wall.  Their neck is at a strange angle and it doesn't look like a particularly comfortable position.  One of their arms is splayed to the side and its fingers are loosely threaded through a mug's handle; there's still a small wet spot on the quilt near the lip of the mug.

They.......don't really seem to be moving.

“Hello?”

Vern looks at Jamie, then back at Lane, then to Jamie again.

"...Hi?"

“Is sleeping like that unremarkable in your culture.”

"Well, if you're using hours and hours of wakeravel..."

“They aren’t... breathing.”

"Well."  Gesture, possibly at the mug but too broad and inexact to be certain.

“Are they already dead, or is not breathing a known and harmless side effect, or is it neither of those.”

She looks at Jamie in confusion for a long moment.

"She's........right...there?" she eventually tries.

- She appears to abruptly realize something and panickedly pokes Lane's arm a few times, to no particular result.  For some reason this seems to assuage whatever she was afraid of.  "Yeah.  I mean, presumably she's breathing like, at all, right?"

“Is splashing a sleeping person with water to wake them up taboo in your culture.”

"...It seems rude?  And then the blankets would be wet.  - Not that I mind being rude to her right now.  But I bet it probably wouldn't even work anyway, that's the whole point of drugs, and if it did then probably," poke poke poke poke nonresponsive Lane "would too."

This whole scene seems... wrong.

If he were mind controlled and he wanted to commit homicide, temporarily playing dead would be an excellent way to go about it. If he wanted to commit homicide or kidnapping or whatever and he were - just slightly dumb, in the way that people are when they think they’re very bright - and he didn’t know the exact abilities or sleep schedule of his target, he might even hand him over to an accomplice while recuperating, and then arrange to trap his target in a confined space.

Not all of the weapons on Jamie’s person look like carrots.

He shifts his posture around, just a bit, rearranges his hands in what looks like fidgeting. If he’s going to be confined in a room with two complete unknowns he’s going to be confined and dangerous. 

“I don’t think we can do anything right now, then.”

"Yeah, no, probably not.  We should probably just like, hang hereish till she wakes up?"

“Mmhm.”

He turns and walks out of the bedroom; this probably happens uneventfully, but if not he sure does have a lot of weapons.

(Can he grow anything out of the walls? He tries for a tiny, useless mushroom in the corner, these are terrible growing conditions but he should be able to get something - nope.)

Jamie's exodus does not particularly call for the use of his weapons.  Vern follows.  Lane's house is just as quaint as hers, although along slightly different axes; more books and papers and things that from context are probably equipment for some sort of magic use.  There are a few musical instruments hanging on the walls, not particularly resembling any Jamie's seen before, with paired copies of each kind.

"I wouldn't guess we know any of the same card games, but I can't think of a better way to pass the time?"

“Sure.”

They can... do that, probably.

"Okay so, you probably don't know enough to have any opinions on which one so we'll go with Chainweave.  There's a draw pile and a discard pile, and you're trying to get rid of all your cards.  You can only play ones that are next to the one on top of the discard pile, with either their number or the suit or both.  Suits go flowers ivy pumpkins grapes horses bats, and you can do whatever from either side; if you can't play anything draw until you can."

(Vern: still very thoroughly mediocre at communicating clearly with people from different cultural backgrounds.  Conveniently it does seem to be the same game Lane already taught Jamie.)

“I already know the rest from Lane, we can go ahead.”

"Well I mean that's really all there is to it but okay."

And they can play for not quite an hour before noises - a bit of rustling fabric, the sound of shifting weight - start coming from the bedroom, quiet enough that they could easily be imagined.  Until the whimpering starts; it's pretty clear what that is.

“Do you want to volunteer to check on that?”

"I feel like we probably both should?"

“Sure.”

She waits a moment for Jamie to go first; when he doesn't move, she begrudgingly heads to the bedroom.  At the door she pauses, gives a quiet "Lane?", but opens it when there's no response from inside.

Lane has fallen over from their spot in the corner and is now curled up on their side, half under the quilt and half on top of it.  Tear-tracks run down their face and their breath comes in shudders; they are, if not particularly responding to the outside world yet, definitely alive.