Coriander and Ava are on their way back to the HEART office following a meeting with hospital staff. After several false starts or disappointments, it's beginning to look like they're finally going to get the expedited transplant program underway -- the protocols, checklist updates, and logistics are all ready, several hospitals have agreed to sign on following the successful demonstrations HEART conducted during the last two months, and there's even media interest in covering the official launch.

Coriander is driving while Ava naps in the passenger seat. As they pass through an intersection, there's a screech of brakes, a sudden blaring honk -- and a truck smashes into the side of the sedan before Coriander can get them out of harm's way. Everything goes black for an indeterminate amount of time, and as things come fuzzily back into view it's apparent that Coriander and Ava... aren't where they used to be.

Suddenly two people have appeared from nowhere on the floor of the twins' future bedroom??

(It's the biggest room in the house, with a door that closes and bolts shut, and right now it has no furniture and only empty floorboards but of course it's where she would put the twins.)

- except now there are suddenly-appearing people.

Magic can't do that!!?? 

(That's her first thought. Her second thought is that she may as well already be dead - if magic can do teleports on demand then they can come after her no matter how far she runs - and it's not fair, when she's sacrificed so much to survive this long–)

But of course magic doesn't know or care about 'fair', so there's no point in dwelling on it. And she isn't dead yet, it seems. 

Thirel takes a deep breath, and lets it out, and controls her face to show only calm. It's not safe to show anything else. 

"- What are you doing here?"

"Geh! Um, what? Who are you?" Coriander scrambles to her feet.

Ava has just been woken up from a nap by a sudden impact and now is lying on the floor of a place she's never seen before. Is this a dream? She looks around from the floor to see if there's any convenient text for her to read and then look back at.

There isn't any written text in Ava's line of sight; it's an empty room, the plaster walls recently repainted, a floor of aged but solid hardwood. 

- empty except for a woman in her fifties or sixties, pale-skinned and golden-eyed; it's hard to tell if her hair is white with age, or just white-blonde. 

She takes a step back, and then takes a deep breath and places her feet. "I am as you see me." (This is much more idiomatic in her native tongue.) "Who sent you here, and with what magic?" 

"Wait, time out, pausepausepause. Magic. You said that in a way that implies magic is real."

What else is this unexpected person on her floor expecting, exactly? You might as well ask whether water is real. 

"Who sent you?" Thirel repeats. "And - from where?" 

"No one sent us, we were about to die, and now I'm here, and, and -- I've visited a lot of hospitals in the past year or so and I'm pretty sure this is not a hospital!"

"...we were about to die?"

"Yes Ava we were about to die. Probably? A truck was about to hit us. Maybe we would live? It didn't seem like the type of thing where we were going to live."

Ava sits up. "Cori, if I died because you were using your phone while driving again, I'm going to... uh..."

Ava's voice trails off -- actually, she has no idea what she's going to do. This is rather outside her normal wheelhouse.

"No I wasn't using my phone while driving! And besides, it's perfectly within normal safety margins when I do it, you should see my test scores, I know that's what everyone probably thinks given reference class forecasting but I actually did the test -- and yes, I know bringing this up isn't helping my case that I wasn't, but I actually wasn't, I just think we should also be epistemic about these things..."

The two seem to have forgotten Thirel in their bickering and could probably continue like this for some time.

Some stupid pointless combat reflex from half a century ago is yelling at her to call an alarm

(it's a spell, a particular mental motion, complicated enough that most people could never master it no matter how hard they tried but she isn't most people, is she–)

but of course that alarm went to her superiors in the Empire and she isn't there anymore, and even if someone is still listening (which they almost certainly aren't because alarm-spells have progressed in leaps and bounds along with everything else), why would she want them to know - 

Focus. 

"Hey. Listen," and she pushes into the word with her mind (another thing she hasn't done in almost half a century) and her voice rings and echoes unnaturally through the room. 

Pause, to see if they're listening - 

- on reflection she's not sure how she's understanding them, to the extent she is - they keep saying things to each other that don't sound like words at all - 

She does know what a hospital is, at least. 

"This isn't a hospital. Were you trying to reach a hospital?" 

They're listening, all right. Coriander is trying to determine whether that was magic. On priors it certainly wasn't, it was a concealed speaker or something? But it definitely feels like there's an update coming somewhere, since priors definitely don't hold that something like this is going to happen. Unless she's asleep? She is kind of disoriented. Coriander starts spinning around in place. Mid-spin she replies:

"No actually we were leaving a hospital but if we were seriously wounded we might wake up in one? But if we died we would probably wake up in a morgue though of course being dead would rather preclude that."

Her voice, already rather fast, is not made easier to understand by the fact that she's spinning around and therefore not facing Thirel for much of this.

Is Cori... uh, yeah. Okay. Actually that makes a lot of sense. Ava gets up and starts spinning too.

Thirel would have several questions at this point, if it were safe to ask questions if she didn't have multiple higher priorities. 

"I see."

(She doesn't, actually, but the words come out anyway, a habit she thought she had set aside forty years ago but it's still there.)

"As I am sure you've noticed, this isn't a hospital. What country do you come from." 

There are options other than the Empire, after all. The randomly-appearing (by magic that shouldn't exist) young women, could be from one of the outlying provinces of the Republic. Or somewhere even more exotic. 

(There's no reason to assume that they're spies. It almost certainly doesn't mean that the life she left behind has finally caught up with her; it would be bizarre, for the Empire to come after her now, after all this time.) 

(And yet no matter how many times she repeats it to herself, she isn't reassured.) 

"America!"

She stops spinning. Drat, didn't work.

Ava keeps spinning for a bit. It does not in fact seem to be stabilizing things, but worth a try? More dakka and all that.

Thirel has never heard of 'America'. Though somehow she isn't very surprised. 

- She's also not sure what they were trying to do with the spinning. It almost looked like an attempt at a spell, but - so clumsy - and also no one does spells with dance anymore, that was history even when she was a tiny child - 

She smiles. It's a tense smile. 

"You are in the Republic of Otun now." In her newly-rented apartment, but she doesn't say that out loud, not yet. 

Ava tries spinning harder for a bit while As-You-See-Me is talking -- but no, yeah, she's still saying words that don't sound like words and the spinning isn't helping. So probably not dreaming, then? That would have been a lot easier. Ava plops back down on the floor.

"The... Republic of Otun?" She knows of no such country, the words still sound wrong, and she's pretty sure this person should know what America is.

"Um, real quick, what year is it?"

"Year nine of the Glorious Future." Thirel's shoulders are tense. Her smile is unconvincing.

(Almost year ten. The anniversary is in a couple of weeks. She...mostly prefers not to think about it.)