A woman wearing very eccentric clothes with heterochromatic red and blue eyes and pink wings emerges. She waves happily and smiles.

"Eep!"

She was already looking warily at the forming Rift, and wields the censer defensively towards the newcomer, a pane of light forming in the air in front of her momentarily, then lowers it and looks a bit embarrassed.

"-Oh! Otherworlder! Hello!"

"Hi, nice to meet you. Where am I?"

"Uh, straight to business, huh? This is an old cursed site. Near Noten. On Tirra. You just fell through a rift, they happen rarely and lead to other worlds. There's no danger here as long as a priestess like me comes by once in a while and reinforces the seals. Where are you from?"

"Oh, I'm from Terraria! My name's Akira."

"I'm Megi! Nice to meet you. What's Terraria like? I haven't heard of that one."

"Oh, it's a lot of fun, there's always plenty of fights to be had and people keep coming up with new ones or changing old ones."

"...Ah-huh."

Something clicks in her head, something Weiss said once, a story she was telling... But she can't remember it.

She throws back her hood and shifts her robes around a bit, revealing long pointy ears that flick around for a few moments, then twitch at every new sound.

"If you really like fights there's a lot of curses out there. Not right here because of the seals but anywhere there aren't a lot of people probably has plenty."

"That's cool. Does fighting the curses do anything?"

"By itself, they'll come back eventually, but it keeps people safe from them! Cryptids- Especially dangerous and smart curses- Mostly don't come back if you actually finish them off. They're also much nastier than the garden variety ones, I'd be cautious."

"That makes sense. It's usually harder to do things that last. What else do people do around here? You said there's a whole world here is it just about fighting curses or do people also do other things?"

"Well most people live in cities or towns or villages. About half of them are farmers of some stripe. You get all sorts. People shop and eat nice food and play games and do magic and make art and things like that. I'm a priestess, which means I'm aligned with the Light Gods and I can sort of channel their power without them having to do most of the work-" 

She glows again.

"And that divine power is what makes the wards here work! It can also do blessings and things like that. And priestesses teach people about being good and give them guidance. Would you like to come have some tea with me once I finish this blessing?"

"Sure! That sounds nice." She'll wait patiently and watch closely as Megi does her work.

She chants prayers and glows as she walks around the symbolic rope cord barrier. To Ilumine, to heal and soothe. To Ragni, to renew and keep away zombies. To Galasa, to stand vigilant and brave. To Hekosi, for an effort that will take an eon, one tiny step at a time.

And then they can go to a little rest hut, erected just nearby probably specifically for visiting priestesses. It's a one room house with a stove and a fireplace and a desk and two chairs and a bed. Plus a well. She starts a fire with flint and steel and puts a kettle on. 

"Tea will be ready in about five minutes. Any particular flavor preference?"

"Oh right! Some places have more than one kind. I'll try whatever you like best."

She puts on an interesting mixed black tea. Kind of fruity.

"There we go. You've got quite an interesting look going on, Akira."

"Thanks, I designed it myself. I wanted something a bit more understated than my brothers but still distinct."

She sips at the tea. "Oh, this is good!"

"Oho. I've gone for more of a luxurious look, to match my natural colors- Gold with dark skin and reddish tones. Rubies. My paler sisters would be better served by silver or white in some cases, but I like these firmer colors."

"They work well for you! Do you like the red color or are you just sticking with it because that's what you started with?"

"It's what we started with. Even kitsunes can't change natural looks easily- And cosmetics are a pain to apply and wear off under strenuous activity."

"Oh huh, are there a lot of people who want to change and can't or is it just one of those things?"

"I wouldn't say there's a lot who desperately want to. A few people are very unhappy about how they look or what their body is like. The most common case of that is boys wanting to be girls and the reverse. Most are just kind of wistful, it's just a fact of life- Hair dye takes maintenance, makeup requires reapplication, illusion magic is expensive and also expires."

"Oh, I have potions for that one. The boy to girl or girl to boy one. There's ways to change the rest at home too but I'm not sure if they would work here. Potions are portable though."

"Some people who are not me would very much enjoy that! I don't think we can do it, local magic and foreign magic tend to do different things."

"Yeah, most things in my world are focused on moving and fighting but we've also got a lot of things for building, mining and changing how you look."

"I don't know how to sum up magic here. There's a lot. Not just moving and fighting, though."

"Yeah a lot of places are better filled in like that. It tends to make them harder to summarize."

"Is Terraria not very 'filled in'? Like... A story someone wrote instead of a whole world with all the details?"

"Something like that. It's more about the experience than a story though."

"Mhm. Well, we're filled in and a lot of people like it that way, I'm pretty sure. If you want to know about societies there's two big ones and about half a dozen smaller ones that make the summary. And for magic, you have priestesses, wizards, witches, sorcerers, kitsunes, and weird one-offs. Oh, and artifacts. You're a weird one-off, I'm a kitsune and a priestess."

She smiles broadly. "That's so cool. Being in filled in worlds is a lot of fun. It can sorta happen naturally with enough time and the right starting pieces but it's really hard to do quickly and home really doesn't have the right starting pieces. Some of the other spark holders have tried but it doesn't quite hold together."

"We're making new people all the time around here, I think that probably helps. Well, not me personally, though it might be kinda nice... Are spark holders rare?" And what are they, just 'people like me' like she'd call her sister-kitsunes?

"Oh, we're the hosts! We tweak the world so it's more fun for visitors and to give them new things to experience if they visit more than once."

"Ahhh. The Light Gods are the closest thing to that here in Tirra."

Which is a little bit of a scary thought.

"Maybe! Regardless, I'm just a visitor here so it would be rude for me to try to make changes like that even if I could. Introducing little bits of magic around the edges like the potions I mentioned is probably fine but if the hosts tell me not to I won't even do that."

Her ears twitch slightly in amusement.

"Well, there's nine of them, do you want me to guess what each would say about that based on what I know as a priestess?"

"That would be great. I really don't want to be rude. If I don't hear anything I just try to use my best judgement on what's allowed. Really strict hosts will just make it impossible for me to do some things but I still have my wings and it doesn't feel like my basic abilities are restricted."

"Hmm... I don't know what-all you can do, some of it might be a big deal, but let's see."

"Galasa would want you to explore and do things that make the world better. Better in terms of- Teaching people, helping them be brave, protecting them from bad things. Illumine wants you to please not hurt people too much unless they started it, and even then maybe not. Alteri likes it when people plan carefully and work hard on things that make them proud, whether it's a house to live in or a work of art."

"Otena likes people having friends, family, and lovers. She'd want you to make friends and do fun things together. Tamamo is the goddess of foxes and she likes - whimsy, when people do crazy silly things or get pranked and surprised. She's sometimes a little cruel, though. Isara likes things having nice predictable cycles and ways of working, she might be the most opposed to any big changes."

"Hekosi is hard to explain but I guess, if you wanted to change something big he'd want you to have to really work for it. Erius likes trading and things being fair and justice, and travelling. He'd want you to sell magic stuff. And finally Ragni mostly just wants people to be happy in the moment- Good harvests and things like that. Oh, Ragni especially hates undead. If you make undead he will be really mad at you. Goodness, it's kind of a lot to explain all nine at once."

"So, my main power is that I can make things, mostly fairly specific things and some of those are magic. The other thing that I expect might work here is that I can anchor things when I build them. That makes them a lot stronger and makes them block some dangerous things and also ignore inconveniences like gravity.

"When I'm home I can also tap into the summoning layer and make creatures appear or give out some of my powers to other people but I don't really expect either of those to work here."

"Ooh, magic things? Like those potions. I'd be just a little bit curious to try one if another to go back was right handy and there weren't people who'd want them more, I admit."

"If I can make something I can usually make as many as I want. I don't want to pass out a lot of things like weapons but I'm fine with handing out lots of potions and the herbs used to make them. Seeds too." She produces a small bottle that fits in her palm with a swirling purple and teal liquid inside it.

"Ooh, seeds." She peers at the bottle. "Shiny. Very aesthetic. I take it this is one of the gender change potions? Is it - transmissible, teachable? The only reason wizardry is becoming as endemic as it is in the north is because anyone can learn the simple things by rote."

"Yep, do you actually want to try it. I'll have another one ready in case you don't like it some people react more strongly than others." She holds it out.

"As for whether it's transmissible; making potions is easy. Getting the herbs is a little harder because you need to harvest them at the right times but anyone can learn."

"Mm... Tempting, but I don't have the right clothes for it, or the right people to have fun with it, right now. So, thanks but nah."

"Oh right, I'm so used to clothes automatically resizing themselves. I forget that not all clothes do that." The potion vanishes from her hand.

"That sounds awfully convenient. What kinds of things do you want to do here? Playing tour guide and watching the chaos you'll inevitably cause sounds like fun."

Their tea is mostly gone now.

"Well, I do eventually want to try fighting curses but I want to know more first if I can, at least I assume there's people who can tell me about what sort of thing I need to expect. I'd also like to see a place with more people it's always fun to just experience being in a big settlement seeing people interact with each other. And maybe I can also make some people happy by handing out some seeds and explaining basic potion making."

"The town of Khinsal isn't too far away from here. It's the last big settlement before the Great Canyon trade route, which goes through dangerous lands. They do a lot of woodcraft and really like birds. It's maybe two days walk, but much less if you shortcut through the Spirit World."

"Shortcut through the spirit world? What does that mean? I can fly a lot faster than most people can walk but that sounds much more interesting."

"The spirit world is made of ideas and concepts instead of space and matter. It mostly kinda sorta works the same way as here because most concepts people have are of stuff that exists here, but things can be different distances from each other, and be extra magic, and things like that. So we can do a nice riverside stroll and watch the landscape bend and writhe as the dreams pass by, and then exit close to town."

"Wow! That sounds so cool I don't think I've seen anything like that before."

"Okay, we can do that, then! Let me just clean up here a bit and we can go. It's easier to cross over at symbolic gates and there's one not far from here."

She starts putting away the tea stuff.

"Sounds good." She'll wait at least relatively patiently. With the time she has she'll look around and try to capture as much detail as she can. Not with a particular goal in mind or an expectation it's important but it's easy to be a bit excited about new worlds.

The cabin has a lot of little details that would demonstrate how it was built and how people use it, which the author does not want to figure out. The forest is temperate, mixed pine and oaks, with a number of small birds and furry critters and tiny insects around.

The ruined bunker is a bare concrete edifice with concrete stairs down. The place is a spartan set of rooms and hallways, completely empty except for old bloodstains and the odd drain, rusty rebar protrusion, or puddle. To magical senses, it might appear... Slightly ominous. But to mundane ones, it's just a cramped empty bunker.

She finishes cleaning up, and then it's just a brief little walk down the packed dirt path to a slightly faded red painted torii gate, and she holds out her hand and, once taken-

-They are somewhere else. The trees are greener here. The dirt of the ground feels more wholesome and healthy somehow. The animal sounds are different, but if anything seem more real than before. It's night here, and the moon is shining, where it was not before. And there is a very faint ambient disquiet sort of feeling, like shadows clinging to the woods off the path.

Wow!

Akira is even more interested in this new place. She was half expecting a more chaotic dreamscape sort of place but this is really cool and unique.

She speaks quietly just in case that feeling of disquiet is important, "Do we need to be careful or something or stay quiet?"

"Not on the main road! Maybe let me do the talking if we meet a real spirit, but they're fairly rare. The one to watch out for in this region is the Charioteer, who likes to careen down the spirit paths at maximum speed and doesn't care about anyone in the way getting hit. So if I tell you to get off the path, don't hesitate- But don't go too far either."

"Makes sense. Everything is kind of deeper here isn't it? It's... perfected... isn't the right word but everything has more weight and it's closer to the way people think about it rather than all the variations that happen."

She starts quick walking down the path.

"Yeah, that's right to the heart of it, really. The Spirit World is formed from the stories, hopes and dreams, the impressions and echoes left from the Material... And then it interacts with itself and twists and becomes a little bit different, of course, it only perfectly reflects the Material in places that haven't had a lot of history. There are places like that, though, we call them 'thin'. There's not enough history there to be realer-than-real, yet. The whole ocean is all pretty thin, for example, save for some coastlines and bays. A vast deep."

"Huh, so you don't have any sorts of people who live in the deep ocean then? No famous naval battles that shaped their vicinity?"

"Merfolk exist, though mostly around the shallow, warm waters of southern Noten I think. And I think the gods wiped most of that clean, or at least suppressed it? And the coasts and bays can be more lively. There are some nasty, nasty places if you go wandering. Echoes of desolation. Before that bunker back there was cleared out, looted, and continuously blessed for a few decades, there probably would have been monsters coming out to bite us here. And that's not out of the question still."

"Huh is this a cataclysm world then? Somewhere that was at peace or in a sort of golden age and then there was a big disaster that broke a lot of things?"

"I wouldn't call it a golden age, by all accounts the old empire was awful to everyone including itself. The cataclysm was the war that happened when they fell apart, reportedly, though it was also reportedly massively destructive."

"Hmm, I think that still mostly counts. So are the curses all traced back to that war or did they just get worse?"

"You know, I don't actually know. I wasn't around back then, the longest I remember back is about... Three hundred years? And it was about four thousand ago."

The nighttime oak forest twists, dreamlike, into a cliffy pine wood. They're going along a mountainside path with a stellar view of a large lake, now, a minute after they were going through a densely overgrown canopy.

Akira watches carefully but even watching closely she can't quite catch the transition as a logical thing, which she supposed makes sense. "Weird. I guess there's the dream logic. And makes sense about the history."

"I think it's really quite amazing! You can see things and do things in the Spirit World that just don't quite make sense in mundane material!"

"It seems that way. I've visited a few places with their own kind of logic like this but they usually force me into a weird body to work with that."

"A weird body? I suppose places that are sufficiently strange just - would not support bodies made of flesh and bone and blood, or ones made of dreams."

"Oh yeah, one time I was a metal horse who pretty much couldn't ever stop running and left a trail of rainbows behind me. And another time I was... a kind of machine that could only move in these really specific ways to make sure meat got cooked properly."

".....And here I thought Tamamo had done some pretty extreme things to our bodies to craft a particular experience." Megi shakes her head. "We're, uh, powered by sex. Not exclusively, but it's definitely the easiest and most fun way."

"Huh, I haven't really had sex before. It's been a thing once or twice but I haven't really explored those paths it's most commonly emphasized in nursery worlds and I don't spend much time in those."

"Is a nursery world a 'filled in' world, better for people to grow up in? Well, it can be very fun, but it's also emotionally and socially tense sometimes, probably best to not just... Jump right in, if you decide you're interested."

"Usually, but the actual meaning of nursery worlds are worlds that let people make new real people. Most worlds don't. Any spark holder can make fake people but real people are special and so nursery worlds are kinda rare; people have all sorts of opinions about what it's okay for a nursery world to be like. They tend not to care as much about other worlds."

"Oh. Yes, this is a nursery world. Most people aren't in a position to have strong opinions about what it should be like in a way to actually... Implement them. Sounds nice."

"Huh, that's a little weird. Maybe your world is more isolated than I thought or something else is happening that I don't understand. Do you think your world is bad?"

"I wouldn't have said so this morning! There are plenty of fun things here. You kind of learn to accept the bad things as 'just how it is', if you don't have the option to jump ship. Now, I'm not entirely sure. I'd have to see other worlds to tell, maybe."

Now they're passing through a windy cliffside road. The lake is still visible in the far distance, but there's no trees around anymore.

"Sure! Visiting other worlds is a great way to know what works and what doesn't and what you really want to see changed. Maybe one day you'll go out and earn your own spark and come back to contest the ownership here."

"I'm not the ambitious type. I'm mostly content wandering around doing what feels right in the moment, hanging out with friends, having sex with friends, shopping for cool stuff, helping people with things like that old cursed bunker, that kind of thing."

"That's okay too. It would be pretty boring if everyone was a world hopper. It's great that there's so many different sorts of people!"

"It really is, hm? I'm thinking of people you might get on well with. I mostly know other kitsunes, at least as, like, close friends..."

"If you don't have lots of sorts of real people then you have to fill things out with fake people. And even the most sophisticated ones of those always have something missing. You can't really maintain a friendship with them and weird things happen if you go too far away from their scripts. It's part of why I travel a lot. Home is mostly filled with fake people and there aren't even that many of them."

"It does sound awfully lonely. I'm getting the impression that there's no real - serious stakes? Nothing that will be ruined forever if you fail?"

"Back home, mostly there aren't except for you know the limited number of tries a challenger has if they want to earn a spark. There's places that try harder to make choices matter, but it's a bit a hard balance to strike, the best way to have real stakes is to have real people involved in a persistent environment. 

"But then it's harder to have a curated experience for new people. Also you need to make people buy into the artificial stakes you're creating. While also not making those stakes so harsh that you end up exiling or driving away a bunch of the people you need to make the world work."

"We go too far in the other direction. I don't think it was deliberate, per se... Or at least not deliberately set up the way that the Light Gods as they stand now would if they were starting from scratch. They had a Calamity to clean up after kicking out the bad ones and the current system is designed to help with that. The stakes are pretty harsh for most people, mostly in the day to day material conditions and the Great Wheel of Reincarnation- It respawns people, but stripped of most memories, which is in some ways, not the same people anymore."

"That's weird, both in being a very harsh memory management schema and in being universal. Are you sure that's how things work?"

"I don't know if it's entirely without exception, and I may be giving a distorted view of it, but I'm pretty sure, yes. I sometimes talk to the spirits of the dead, and help them resolve their last requests or last business here before going to the Wheel. I've died before, and... It's hard to describe without feeling it, but I definitely lost more than the years I didn't have a body."

She thinks about that briefly. "I see... wait no. I'm just confused now. I really don't know what's going on now. What you're describing feels close enough to what I'm used to that it doesn't sound like it's just a made-up story like some worlds use to frame what they want people to do but it doesn't quite line up how I'd expect either."

"Hmm! Perhaps we can try again later."

For now, though, their passage through dream-woods has turned to a nice dream-cobblestone road with flickery, drifting, cartoonish farmhouses in the distance.

"We're about there, no trouble today."

"That's good, and sure I'm not in a rush to figure things out."