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.) 

Ava would really like to ask what year the Glorious Future started, but even if the words sound weird she can hear the Capital Letters there, and that does not look like a smile that is reaching the eyes, and maybe therefore this is the type of thing that one shouldn't ask about?

"In what year did the Glorious Future start?"

She just SAID it was year nine of the this is clearly not the question they're actually asking? 

And Thirel...thinks that she sort of gets the question that they are trying to ask. (From almost no context, it's becoming increasingly clear that these people, whoever they are, aren't from the Republic or the Empire - that they know nothing about the war, about the events of the last half-century...)

Thirel takes a deep breath. Lets it out.

"Officially, nine - almost ten - years ago. Unofficially...a long time before that, but - it gets subjective - there is  no bright line one can draw." 

Pause. 

"The war began about fifty years ago." 

"War. Which war? And you won and proclaimed the Glorious Future after that, or what?"

"It's not as though I won it personally!" 

And she's angry, suddenly, for no reason at all–

- for deeply predictable reasons, that she should have dealt with decades ago, but she hadn't realized there was anything there left to deal with until now, being confronted by it - 

"Nobody won, really." 

"Uh, Cori, maybe don't..." She trails off. Maybe don't get us killed by this maybe-traumatized woman who maybe has access to actual magic?

"Ah sorry! I didn't, um... I think the recent history I remember is very different? What continent are we on?"

"Here they call it Otarun." Which just means 'the continent' in an archaic dialect. "In the Empire they call it Akal. In 'America' they might have other words - is America one of the Territories?" 

Going by the visitors' faces, they don't recognize those names either. 

"- I would show you a map, but I don't have a hard copy of one. I can copy it from a Sideworld archive but at that point it would be just as fast to answer your questions." 

"A map would help a lot if you have one I think?"

"I can have one for you in a few minutes." 

Under normal circumstances, it would be a lot simpler to just bring them to the relevant Sideworld archive along with her, but these circumstances are abnormal in so many ways. In fact, if– well, if almost everything about the world were different, she would probably be calling in a report to the local City authorities about the unexpected interlopers in her apartment.

In the world as it actually was, of course, Thirel had absolutely no intention of reporting anything at all to any supposed authorities. 

"I would offer you a seat and something to drink," she hears herself say, "but..." Vague gesture around the empty room. "Wait for me here." 

And she leaves and ducks into the bathroom, which has a bolt on the inside of the door, and locks it, before taking our her portable artifact-crystal - most practicing magi wouldn't be able to project to a secured Sideworld at all, with such minimal equipment, but Thirel barely needs the artificial aid at all. Still, she's hardly comfortable making herself that vulnerable in front of strangers. 

(The two women will be left alone in the bare unfurnished bedroom for about five minutes.) 

"I think that went well!" 

"Oh come on what does that look mean? The map will help us learn where we are! Obvious hypotheses include that this is a prank, that we somehow were seriously injured and took a long time to recover and were put here for some reason -- okay now that I say it out loud that one doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. Hm."

"You don't look older do I look older?"

"Cori, this... isn't a game or a dream or something? It could be some kind of hallucination but that would itself be a really bad sign -- how are you so chipper about this?"

"Ava, what else is there to do? If I stop and mull over all my emotions here, I am going to go crazy, maybe I already am crazy, the only thing to do right now is to get as much information as we can and crying about how everything I care about maybe doesn't exist anymore doesn't help do that so I'm not doing it and maybe after I figure this all out there will be time for that but not right now, Ava, don't tempt me with that!"

"Cori, we might have actually died! We might actually be dead!"

"If we were dead would we be talking? Besides, worrying about that doesn't help us solve it does it now?"

"Oh, my apologies for worrying about all the people who are going to die because you got us into this situation and now HEART isn't going to be able to launch its program and those transplants won't get through..."

"Because I got us into this situation? I assure you this was by no means something that I was interested in doing, and as soon as I figure out how to get us out of this situation I'll do that, and you sure don't seem to be helping with that, so maybe just go on being scared while I solve everything, again, I always have to do all this stuff myself --"

"Wow, you're really going there? Really? You always micromanage everything, maybe if you let anyone else ever have ownership of anything or treated them as actual collaborators then maybe you wouldn't have to keep such a tight grip on stuff? I am so sick of "Cori solves everything herself", insofar as it's true around here it's true because you don't let us help you!"

"Oh uh... I'm sorry, now we're both sad, that's not what I wanted..."

"No, you're-- uh -- they say "that which can be destroyed by the truth should be," and you're... maybe not altogether wrong per se but this really wasn't the time..."

"Okay I'm sorry but I think if there's ever a time for something like this, "right after your boss's carposting got you both killed" has got to be one of the best options."

"I WAS NOT CARPOSTING!" This time she can't help but laugh, though.

Sitting on the floor with her back against the locked bathroom door, Thirel closes her eyes and shapes delirious spiral patterns in her mind, simple and then more complex - 

- and her body is still there, but she's somewhere else.

Copying Archive items without a scaffolding or any kind of workshop or laboratory is deeply inconvenient, but there are reasons why Thirel was found, chosen, and taken from her family at nine years old, to serve an empire she never chose. And there are reasons why she survived it, too, and survived escaping it. 

She forms the deep-engrained patterns in her mind, guides and shapes the magic, and within five minutes she's opening her eyes in the physical world again, and - for lack of any better surface to work on - the information contained in the Archive map is etched in scorched lines on the fabric wrapping that used to house her artifact-crystal. 

She gets up, unbolts the door and steps out and crosses the hall back to the bedroom, and offers her makeshift map-copy without saying a word. 

Um. Not good.

Oh dear.

"So, um, As-You-See-Me -- this isn't what our world looks like."

Thirel gives her a blank look, very briefly, until she processes the content and has more important things to be confused about. 

"I don't know what you mean. Are you - used to a different map projection -"

It's not that, she already knows it's not that even as she's saying the words, but she doesn't know what else to think. There may be other worlds, some scholars think so, but they would be ever so far away, unreachable even with all the magic of the Glorious Future, and it's hardly as though you could get here from there by accident and then be confused about it. Which these poor children - she's not sure when she started thinking of them as 'poor children' but it seems she is now - certainly are...

"No uh here our continents are different, it looks like this..." she rummages around her pockets briefly.

"Ava do you have a pen?"

Ava begins patting her own pockets. Suddenly, she slaps herself in the forehead.

"No pen, but look! Phone!" 

"...and it's dead. Ugh. Of course. Cori, do you have your --"

"No it was in the car, I'd have already tried."

"As-You-See-Me, do you have a pen?"

"Yes, but nothing else to write on." It's not as though much writing happens outside of the Sideworlds, nowadays. She digs it out and offers it to the woman anyway. 

(It's neither a ballpoint nor a fountain nor any other recognizable design of pen; it's very light, apparently made of a bamboo-like substance, and has a soft bifurcated foam-like tip that does not, from this angle, visibly contain ink.) 

"Thanks!" Coriander takes the pen, cheerfully turns to the nearest wall, and starts drawing on it.

On the one hand, that's the wall of her new apartment. On the other hand, it's not as though she was offering any better options. Thirel sighs inaudibly, clasps her hands behind her back, and watches. 

Even allowing for the woman being appallingly bad at drawing, she doesn't recognize the shape of the continents starting to take form. 

She doesn't know what to say, so she doesn't say anything. 

"Tada!"

"Cori, uh, that's not..." She trails off. Honestly, it doesn't really matter that Cori seems to have drawn a world map that lacks multiple continents, even with only this it's pretty clear things are different.