It's night, and they've gone for a walk, listening to some music a friend recommended. It's clever, it exploits synesthesia to look like strobelights, or at least associate. And it does that with a physical instrument, somehow, the friend likes those — might be sped up, but the composer's recorded their feeling of playing it, as a supplement, so it's not that likely, speeding up those is notable differently… (Clematis doesn't have that supplement on, though, right now; those hurt their own proprioception some, too much to navigate anything.) And it harmonises nicely with-

A flash of external blue in front of them. Or — something, they're not paying enough attention to… They walk right through.

They stop in their tracks. A dream, probably. It's — most unusual things in their life have been that, really. Still, they catch that feeling, linger on it, something new, something finally new, really, that's more important if it'll quietly fall away the next morning… They look out, trying to pay attention to what the place is like, remember it. (They've reached, internally, to turn the music off, almost without thinking.)

It's warm and dry. It's night. The moon seems very large, as the shimmering blue disperses in writhing trails of shimmering sparks.

She's on a high rock, way high up in the air as if on the eighth or tenth floor of a building and overlooking a big, gently sloping plain.

The moon is full and bright, bathing the landscape in a cool light. Fields of grasses. with the occasional tree sticking out. Off in the distance, a series of hills rising to mountain near the horizon. In another direction, a slope down towards what might be an ocean. In a third direction, a bird's eye view of a town with walls and streets of stone, houses of wood and clay tiles, cultivated fields all around. She can see light spilling from windows and a few carried lanterns. She can see humans, and also some figures that do not appear quite human. Humanoid, at least. A few are looking towards her perch.

The thing with dreams, though, is that you have to keep your thoughtstream in a careful holding pattern, if you want to keep remembering them. Take their context on faith, don't stare at it in comparison with your waking life, noticing that it doesn't make any sense at all, really. Take their logic on faith.

If it were a dream, they'd climb down and then walk out towards the ocean. They've never seen those before in non-virtual — 'ocean' in the sense of 'enormous body of water', not the newer meaning of 'hole of similar shape in a planet's surface', like the one they live in. And so, holding this flow-state gently, they do start to look for a path down. (There's a nagging sense that something's not quite right with this reasoning, but that's precisely the kind of thing you'd ignore, for this.)

(The humanoid-not-human people their eyes absently glide over; those happen, they almost-think on a nonverbal level, even if they're not just transhumanists, it's a bit of a cosmological mystery but — those happen, Clematis knows.)

There's a bright red-and-white braided rope looped around a very sturdy looking if kind of crude and dented metal piton drilled into the rock over there. That seems to be the only descent method available. Looking down, there are handholds and more hard points carved into the rock on the way down. It's a pretty long way down, though.

One of the humanoids takes off with their wings from the center of town and starts ascending, flying towards the rock.

Huh. They could probably not pull it off, then, the climb down — not at night, not unskilled. They'd try it a bit anyway, if it weren't this high up.

— oh, someone's flying towards them. I wonder why… Oh no, did I do something wrong by being here? No, wait, that doesn't check out, they're here by accident, they'd just explain things if-

No, wait, it really doesn't make sense. Breathe. Now that they do stare at the accident, it doesn't fade away into dream-logic, it's just-

Nothing in particular. At first they were home, and then suddenly somewhere else. A spacetime rift? But those happen so rarely, they'd usually say 'only in stories'. Maybe something else, though…

If the winged person approaches, they'll find Clematis in slightly confused wonderment.

"Hello!" They call out in Notal as they fly past, doing a jaunty wave with one wing-arm, which turns into a roll.

Then they glide down a bit, do a long circle, and come in for a careful landing on top of the part of the peak that does not contain a possible Otherworlder. Flap flap flap flap, and talon-feet cling to the rock. They're breathing hard and wearing low-tech leather and cotton clothes and a braided cord necklace with a metal crescent moon pendant. They have a bird-like head except for big expressive eyes, and bright blue feathers. They wave again.

"Hello!" they wave back. They think that's a greeting, probably. It's interesting (interesting, look at that again), this language is not in any of their databases, so what they can reach for is the contextual learning algorithm, except it hasn't had much material yet…

And, try to figure out if their interlocutor's body language is readable, if any of the social scripts Clematis knows fit; or, closer to, how they'd know if not.