this state of affairs is incorrect

[unblinkered]

Brenda's is closed. Brenda's is never closed. Not during its usual hours, not at 5am. Except on national holidays, or during severe weather, neither of which is present today. There's no notice on the door, just the Open sign flipped around to Closed. This state of affairs is incorrect.

There was no indication that the coffee shop was in financial trouble. Max knew as much from eavesdropping on the teens working in the back. The manager didn't come out much, but she never seemed alarmed or upset- always a little smug, if anything. Max wasn't sure if her name was Brenda, or if that was just the chain- she was always Ma'am to the staff. Her employees-only room down the hall, near the bathrooms- usually dead quiet. All day long, at least when Max was there. Enough activity- footsteps, occasional laughter- to tell she was there, but nothing that indicated any trouble for the store.
An emergency, then. She'd been called away on some urgent business, and... told the kids not to come into work? It wasn't as if she did much managing- could she not trust her staff to do their job unsupervised, despite more or less doing so day in and day out? And...
And no, she couldn't have gone somewhere. Her car, that Volkswagen beetle was there. It was definitely hers, she left to go get lunch every day at 1:00. No other cars parked nearby, that he could see. So, unless she'd gone on foot to something extremely urgent, she was still in the building.
Max knocks. There's no answer.
Max goes around behind the building and takes the key from under the dumpster, where a less than cautious morning-shift barista had been fool enough to retrieve it while someone like Max could have been watching. He opens the door and goes inside, because they don't have cameras and he's a regular- they wouldn't charge him with breaking and entering, he's sure, even if they did find out.

People who aren't Max might have shrugged and gone to a different coffee shop. People who are Max are instead inclined to find out what it is that disturbed their nice, orderly little universe and demand it account for itself. 

It's dark and no one is there. Max looks around for anything out of place, and finds that there is exactly one thing out of place. The manager's door is open. This is considerably more unusual than the related fact, which is that the manager isn't there. Max has seen how careful she is to lock that door before going anywhere.
He goes inside. Privacy is not something Max has a lot of regard for- more something he resents, to some extent. And the room is clearly the sort of thing someone might want to keep private. 

There are bookshelves, and there is a desk, and there are chalkboards, and they are all covered in paper. As is the floor. The paper is covered in smears. Some huge collection of notes, or documents, or something, all smudged into illegibility. Written in pencil, erased by a particularly smeary eraser. Most of the shapes of the smears suggest diagrams and math more than they do writing. Max inspects all of it, searching for clues. Nothing is legible, except for a few notes posted by the door.
The other door. Not the one leading in. A door with scorch marks and dents. A door set into the wall, where according to the geometry of the building, it ought to open into the alleyway, despite no such door being present. The legible notes, written in ink and taped to the wall, read "I HAVE TO GO", "DO NOT OPEN" and "SOMEONE PLEASE BLOCK THIS OFF" and "DON'T LET HER IN" and "YOUR NAME IS PRECIOUS", scribbled in hasty capital letters.

Max wonders what is behind the door. He's unnerved somewhat by the surrounding evidence of the manager having some sort of psychotic break, but his thoughts have not had sufficient time to settle into questions before opening the door. He is still in the information-gathering stage, and there can clearly be nothing behind the door but additional information to gather. The question of whether to open the mysterious door in the mysterious place fails to even cross his mind. 
He steps into a dark room.

Which abruptly stops being a dark room, and starts being a brightly-lit forest. Max's hand, halfway through reaching for the light switch, falls to his side.

Comments

[imeanforever]

"There are rules. Laws of magic and traits of fairy kinds and so on. I really don't understand what's so baffling about leaflets starting in trees. I don't know where it came from, I'm much newer than the world."

[unblinkered]

"Trees," he explains, "are, in my world, plants that evolved to produce more of themselves, and do not ordinarily produce things not tailored to that purpose. They also don't produce things that are members of entirely different species. Unless this tree was somehow specifically modified to serve as a reproductive system for a species of fairy, it's the sort of thing you wouldn't expect to happen by itself. Raising, then, the question of "who modified the tree, and why". Assuming," he admits, "that my model of trees as a product of evolution instead of a product of... fairy... rules, is something other than a profound deception."

He sighs.

[imeanforever]

"It's possible that you're hearing the word I'm using in the way you are for reasons having more to do with what the tree looks like than how it works," suggests Promise.

[unblinkered]

"What, the word "tree"? As in, the "tree" is some kind of... fairy egg, that just looks like a tree for some reason? Or am I not catching your meaning?"

[imeanforever]

"...It's not an egg. It grows from a sprout into a large plant and then sometimes it hollows out and a leaflet appears in it. Although not too often. Most trees don't have leaflet hollows."

[unblinkered]

"So... an R-type... only some of them... or there's a parasite they don't know about... or..."

This is not a question that's either likely to be answered neatly soon, or be useful if pursued further. Max changes tracks.

"You said- you're newer than the world, okay. Clearly. But I'm also newer than my world, and until recently I thought I knew approximately where it came from. We have... people who've looked into it, made their best guess at what the universe is like and why everything is there. It's... if not common knowledge, at least accessible knowledge. Do you have people here, who know that kind of thing? Or who are trying to find out?"

[imeanforever]

"There's books about the past. I have some. But books don't last forever and neither do memories, so they only go back so far. How do you find out where your world came from?"

[unblinkered]

"They... we looked at the sky, figured out how the stars and planets moved, and what they were made of, and what directions they were going in. We dug up the ground and looked at the layers to see what we were standing on top of, and how long it'd been there. We looked at the cells of living things to find out how they were related to each other, and how they were changing, and what they probably looked like before. History leaves traces on everything, like it wants to be discovered."

"And then there's this. We somehow missed this part. And we're probably going to have to do all that tedious research all over again, unless there's someone here who already knows."

He looks at her.

"How long has there been a Queen?"

[imeanforever]

"As long as anyone can remember. She claims to be eternal, but anyone could claim that, I could claim to be eternal if it weren't for the fact that there are lots of leaflets and people know how we start. Are you proposing to bring a lot of mortal scientists in here to - look at things? I think that would end badly."

[unblinkered]

"...I never said "scientists". How do you know that word? Do you have fairy scientists? What have they been doing, if not figuring out where the world is from?"

[imeanforever]

"I don't really know what you're hearing," says Promise. "See earlier remarks with respect to 'tree'. Did you think I'd learned a mortal language for some reason?"

[unblinkered]

Max blinks.

"You don't... know what... language? You don't speak...?"

There's the sickening feeling again. He's pretty sure it isn't hunger this time.

[imeanforever]

"I speak, I just speak - generically."

[unblinkered]

"You don't mean..."

Oh, christ. Not this. Please, not this.

"So you just understand- and I understand- but! That's not... language is complicated, almost as complicated as people! You can't automate... there'd be more conflicts than just trees and scientists, and... and your mouth! It's definitely- the spell would have to bend light, or generate a different image, or directly modify my visual cortex to see something different, and- and the timing, there's no way it'd match up, if I- it'd look like you were still talking when you'd stopped, or that you'd- there were no weird pauses when you finished saying things, how would- how would it know, did someone learn all Earth's- no, it's older than- it'd have to take it from my head, it'd- if i had a different accent, would you sound...?! How does it process the- there's no predictive...! Please tell me I'm hearing you wrong, that it's not really..."

Max's breathing is getting shallower.

[imeanforever]

"Well... I can't guarantee that you aren't hearing me wrong because I don't know what you're hearing? If that helps? Are you okay? I don't really know what to do about it if you... aren't."

[unblinkered]

"Am I... correct in inferring that what is happening is that, by magic, when you speak in your own language, it's magically translated into mine, and vice versa? That's what I'm hoping isn't the case, because of how egregiously nonsensical that would be."

[imeanforever]

"I'm not sure I'd call what I'm speaking a language the way you know them. Otherwise, yes."

[unblinkered]

"That means... this definitely can't be a natural phenomenon. This has to have been engineered by someone, it- it has to be continually updated, as language evolves- holy- there wasn't language that way before people, and you predate people, nothing functions that perfectly in a context it couldn't have predicted, whoever or whatever designed this translation effect... they'd have to still be alive, maintaining the effect and making sure it's working properly, making it work smoothly like that. Even if... even if you speak in, what, pure meaning, optimized for the effect to translate, there'd still be syntactic ambiguity to handle, there could be someone listening to everything we say and-"

Oh, of course. Someone who had magical access to every conversation anyone had, they'd know all sorts of secrets. Like, for instance, the names of anyone who was named here. The names of every fairy. There's someone like that who's supposedly been around forever, right?

"...why is it so out of the question to visit the Queen, besides her being powerful?"

[imeanforever]

"I assure you," says Promise, "that fairies are people. And the Queen can get anything she wants, so the strategy is to avoid being wanted, and what does that have to do with speech?"

[unblinkered]

"It just strikes me that if someone has global translation magic set up to listen to conversations in enough detail to translate them smoothly, they'd know every name anyone ever spoken to someone else here. And there being one very powerful person who knows exactly that and has been around for- oh, sorry about the "people" thing, I meant "humans"- been around for as long as anyone can remember... there's an obvious candidate for who's responsible for speech magic."

[imeanforever]

"Oh, no, that can't be it, my name - for instance - has never been spoken aloud."

[unblinkered]

"What, Pro- oh, right. Pseudonym. Clearly. Otherwise- right. Duh. Did... your tree tell it to you without talking, somehow? Are we sure the translation doesn't apply to nonverbal information transfer? If... wait. Are there books? No, yes, you said there were books. Would I be able to read the books, or would someone need to read them aloud to me?"

[imeanforever]

"I started knowing it. The Queen has never to my knowledge evinced the ability to read minds, just know names. There are books, and you should be able to read them."

[unblinkered]

"Books- so, would the... if I scratched at the letters that looked like English letters, would it scrape off ink, or... or would it really... if you don't use "what I'd think of as a language", how does... I guess it could..."

Wait. No.

"Started knowing it? That's- that's not how information works. At all. Is a name- I mean, if it were encoded in DNA- do you have DNA?- I can see if being a thing that grows out of- but then the system would rely on that, it wouldn't work the same way for mort- do mortal names- how-"

God, he's flailing again. What's the most important line of inquiry right now, even? He takes a deep breath and puts his hand over his mouth.

[imeanforever]

"I don't know if I have DNA," she says. "I mostly study sorcery and more practical-level things like where there's quicksand and where there's hostile fairies and where there's fruit. And I will only let you read my books if you are not going to deface them."