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The two empty mugs dangling from her fingers, Alyra does an about face and walks to where Ceri is gesturing excitedly. "Someone left you what?"
"Oracle cards! They have faeries painted on them and they're made of leaves!" Ceri pauses for a breath. "And they come with a booklet too -- written on bark!"
"Oh." Alyra looks at her friend, smiles slightly, and holds up the mugs. "I need to make us chocolate. I think you -- I mean we -- need it."
Ceri takes a breather while browsing the booklet, and Alyra goes and makes hot chocolate. She returns to find Ceri with her nose buried deep in the bark-covered booklet. She sets a mug on the table next to her friend, carefully so as not to risk damaging any of the leaves. She settles with her own mug into the chair by the fire, but not before glancing at the delicate paintings. She smiles appreciatively at the beauty of the art.
"The Faerie Who Was Kissed By Pixies," Ceri quotes. "Love given. Love received. Metaphorical open-heart surgery."
"Metaphorical what?" asks Alyra, not certain she heard right.
"Er... doctoring you into opening your heart?" Ceri guesses. She turns another page.
Alyra puzzles over that as she sips hot chocolate. At last she decides it does make some kind of sense....
Ceri giggles to herself. "The Faerie of Naughtiness. Mischief. Misrule. Lighten up."
Alyra arches an eyebrow, but the eye beneath it sparkles.
Ceri continues to spout random quotations as she peruses the book, while Alyra contemplatively sips her drink. "Where do you suppose they came from?" she asks after a while.
Ceri finally pulls her nose out of the silver birch peelings and blinks at Alyra as the question sinks in. "What? Oh... you know, that's a good question." She puts the booklet down and stares thoughtfully at the cards.
Alyra pulls her chair closer and nudges Ceri's drink. "Don't let this wait too long. It's already 'cool chocolate.' "
Ceri takes a sip. Even cool, the chocolate is nice. And it finally relaxes her. "You don't suppose..." she says thoughtfully, after a long moment.
"Don't suppose what?"
"Well... the cards are made of leaves. And the book is made of peeled bark. And it's all about faeries... and we heard that giggling right before we came in...." Ceri takes another sip, thinking about her direction problems in Drathir. "And I keep getting lost in the woods," she adds.
Alyra blinks. "What does that have to do with it?"
"Well it's just... those woods seem to be a lot bigger on the inside than the outside. At least to me. Especially after going up hill, over dale, through briar -- and what hill, it's supposed to be flat out there!"
"Um..." Alyra says, eloquently.
Ceri looks at the faerie cards for a long moment, then turns to Alyra; and with complete sincerity asks, "Do you believe in faeries?"
"Well, of course I do!" Alyra replies, surprised that such a question should even need to be asked.
"And they certainly seem to believe in me!" Ceri responds. Her sweeping hand includes the cards and beyond the bookshop. "I mean, just think! Drathir is so big inside, what if we cross a boundary every time we go in?"
Alyra has been raising her mug for another sip; she stops in mid-lift. "What if..." she repeats, half to herself; she brings herself into sharp focus and looks directly at Ceri as she completes the thought, possibly for both of them: "...we cross into Faerie, from Port Luskan?!" She frowns thoughtfully, then shakes her head. "But I don't think so... Faerie is so much different from Drathir; for one thing, much warmer."
Ceri blinks. "How would you know?"
Alyra grins. "I've been there -- didn't I tell you?"
Ceri shakes her head.
"Oh, man, I'm sorry!" Alyra exclaims. "I guess it slipped my mind, with all the excitement of finding Port Luskan here. But there was a portal, or a passage, or a -- Gate! that's what they called it -- from the Hotel to Faerie. I went through it a few times, explored some... even thought about building Windang Hall there, but not for long."
"Huh. Well, why would you think Faerie has to be warmer than here, all the time, everywhere in Faerie?"
"Oh. Good point. They did say there was a lot more of it...."
After a moment, Ceri asks, "What's a 'hotel'?"
"Oh. It's um, like an inn. You can stay there, eat there... Steph and I stayed there for quite a while... well, I stayed longer than she did. She went to her plane, and I went to Faerie and then to mine... that was after everyone else had pretty much vanished."
"Ah." Ceri nods, deciding it must be a local word for 'inn' that Alyra had picked up, wherever this "hotel" was. "Anyway, I've grown up with plenty of stories about getting lost in the woods and ending up in Faerie. That could be what's happening here, right?"
"Something like that... but I think it's a bit more like, there's a passage, and we've stumbled onto it. They called it a Gate, the Fae I met."
Ceri has to pause and think for a bit, as what she's been taught follows a different route. "But, we're in Dreaming. That's a whole 'Gate' in itself, isn't it? Add Drathir to it -- walk over the 'threshold' of a clearing, into a 'faerie ring' of toadstools or their favorite trees, pass from light to shadow or shadow to light, or walk around a tree between two sets of roots, those are all doorways in nature, and the faeries use them." Ceri sounds a bit like she's quoting something.
Alyra ponders this. "It could be the same thing. The Gate I saw was in a circle of stones, at least on the one side. I was never quite sure on the other -- the Fae side -- but it seemed to be a big stone archway. So..." Alyra shrugs and smiles slightly.
Ceri has never noticed, in all her stumblings through Drathir, any "Gate"-like object around her, but shrugs and lets it go. For one thing, this is Dreaming. And for another, it could be they just don't bother with formal Gates here. Or it is a back door of sorts.... At any rate she finally remembers the cards. "Would you like me to try a reading with these, Alyra?"
The question doesn't quite catch Alyra off guard; she has actually been wondering when Ceri will get to it, although by this time she has begun to think she won't. "Um, sure. Why not?"
Post composed from RP by Alyra and Ceri.
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