Then the table and room both vanish, and they're inside what might be a cave or might be a house, lined with alternating wood and rock.  A window looks out on a mountainside with a line of scraggly trees rustling in the wind.  But inside, floor-to-ceiling bookcases line one wall, and a large desk just as messy as Aeslin's living-room the other. 

If Mira looks, every title of every book is crystal-clear.

Aeslin looks up, without breaking the hug.

"Oh.  I didn't mean to do that...  This was my study-room with the Fay.  It was the first time I had the library and lab I really wanted..."

"I don't think that's precisely what I --"

And then they are somewhere else, and not somewhere of hers.  She shuts her eyes.

"Oh...  ...Do you want me to see it?"

"Oh, yes!  Of course!"  She frees one arm to gesture around.

Well, then, she will look.

"Oh, wow, you must have a very good memory to get all those titles right."

"Thank you!"

She gazes at the windowframe, and then releases the hug and slowly walks over to the bookcases and runs her fingers over the spines.

She's just going to let Aeslin do that.

"...So, question, are we in my dreams, or in your dreams, right now?"

Aeslin looks over her shoulder, and then turns from the bookcases.  "Your dream.  If we truly fought over what would happen, just on the level of dreamshaping, you'd win; if you woke up, it'd dissolve around me.

"Of course, there's other dream magic that could prevent that, but I'd still be doing it on you.  And it's risky; there is some safe mind-magic, but dreamwalking hasn't been explored enough to be sure, and I don't like testing those risky parts..."

(She briefly frowns, remembering the first time one of her tests did go wrong.  They were able to heal Trixa afterwards, but it was much more worrisome than Aeslin had imagined before.)

"...Yeah, but I wasn't fighting.  And if this is my dream how did it get information I don't have, like those book titles...?  Am I going to get, like, leakage of your magic knowledge somehow?"

"That's from my dreamwalking magic!  It's putting the images in your mind's mindscape, just the same as how it's putting me in your dream.  It might make you better at dreamwalking if you learned it yourself?  On the subconscious level.  But not enough people have been interested in learning to know for sure.  But it's too limited the way I'm doing it to really give you more of my magic knowledge..."

She purses her lips.  "I could try; it'd work in theory - but that's another risky part."  And it'd take much too long to get her to a good healer when it goes wrong.

"...Yeah, thinking about the potential neirological consequences, I can see why it would not be a good idea."

Aeslin nods.

After a moment, she walks over to the desk, pushes some of the mess over a bit, and hops up to sit on the bit of now-clear space.

"So... What're you thinking about tomorrow?  Or, well, next month?  Still want to keep going with your muggle education here?  Or go study magic?"

"...I am really torn between those two options, because ot seems to me that the magical side of the Masquerade is missing out if you're an exemplar thereof, but also, magic is cool.  I could probably motivate myself to self-study magic somewhat!"

"Missing out - oh, you mean the λ-magic idea?  I do want that to be tested..."  She shakes her head.  "So many projects.

"I can give you a wand tomorrow morning, of course, but I should at least put you in touch with some other mage or Fay... hmm, Edgar wouldn't do anything bad, but who would be the best for someone who thought herself a muggle yesterday..."

"Also, computers.  The general concept thereof.  And it's not just λ-stuff that I think would be interesting to see if I could reimplement magically."

"Oh!  Yeah...  How well do you know programming now?  Or... maybe you should take a look around our mapped-lands to see where computers could be really useful..."

"Enough to write toy programs, play games that are pretty programming-adjacent, understand control flow generally, and little else, if I'm honest."

"Well, that's about how good I was at dreamwalking when I was a little girl... and that impressed people... so maybe?  Except someone getting in your dreams does feel more impressive than playing games on a computer screen."

"Yeah, if nothing else the interpretive layer is such utter bullshit.  And you kind of sort of answer the problem of qualia by doing this!  Do I see the same red as you do?  Hop into my sleeping brain and find out!"

"Yeah!  Fay dreams are really really..." She searches for a word and then settles on, "weird!  In different ways for different sorts of Fay!  And they find my dreams weird too!"

"'course they think humans are weird; they're not even built on the same neural architecture, no?"

"Different ways of seeing the world... both literally and figuratively.  Not fundamentally different ways of thinking, at the core - despite what humans say - but different values sprinkled throughout.  And different origins and views of what society could be.  And then Fay are almost as different from each other as they are from us.

"... I said Cilaria - the Fay who got my parents to get me out of school - was friendly.  And she was.  But is it much less wrong to say she thought of me as her friend, than to say she thought of me as her pet?  Or her project?  I've been in her dreams, and... I really can't say either way."

"...Homestly, I've seen humans who think that way.  Boy did that turn out horribly but that's honestly just as much because that person was a bad pet owner."

"... I'm sure.  If Cilaria hadn't let me -- well, okay technically she bespell me and make me break them before I could leave, but that was explicitly a challenge.  And a fair challenge, and fun."

"Yeah that doesn't seem like a huge thing even though it seems like it ought to seem like it would be.  I could see that pattern recurring elsewhere."

"Yeah, with other Fay it would be.  Well, if they want to do anything like that at all."