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]

"...Why would I need your help? You aren't even a sorcerer. And yes, you can, if you feed us or get our names. Don't try it, please."

[unblinkered]

There is a new, scarier thing to worry about. Promise is probably not secretly evil, her actions and words being consistently inconsistent with the nefarious plan as initially outlined.

"Right, of course you wouldn't. A fairy wouldn't need someone's help to enter the mortal world, right? I..."

He hesitates for moment, wondering if Promise is in fact hostile and trying to trick him into revealing that he knows... before realizing that she'd have no reason not to simply call him on it.

"Until just now", he confesses, "I've been suspecting you of being responsible for creating the gate that brought me here, and of kidnapping someone through it. But that explanation doesn't make sense anymore, and I think that, yes, I do need to get back as soon as possible, because of the alternate explanation for what happened."

[imeanforever]

"I don't even know how to make a gate yet. I'm going to have to learn. I'm afraid that if you came through an unstable gate, and you probably did, the kidnapped someone could be anywhere - I can scry on them if that's a higher priority than figuring out gates, but that doesn't guarantee they're within traveling distance or retrievable if they are."

[unblinkered]

"I'm not... sure the person was kidnapped, actually. The door I went through to get here had notes on it- saying to keep out, to bar the door, and to not let "her" in. What I thought was that you were the "her" on the other side of the door, and that you were planning to get into our world somehow by using me to open a passage."

"What I now suspect is that the kidnapping went the other way- that a mortal used an unstable gate to kidnap a fairy from your world, and... how much do you know about the mortal world? Do you know why this could be extremely dangerous?"

[imeanforever]

"The mortal world has... mortals in it. And apples, apparently. I've read books about it but it's not clear how much to trust them sometimes. I suppose a mortal with a fairy vassal could then - feed the fairy lots of mortal names, since you give those out like candied dewdrops, and command those mortals at one remove?"

[unblinkered]

"That's the worst-case scenario, yes. It's not just easy to get someone to give you their name- we have these things called phone books, see. They're like... we have phones, devices that allow people to speak to anyone at a distance, but each person's phone has a different number attached to it, and you need to know the number to call them. So some people, they use public records to... compile enormous lists of people's phone-numbers alongside their names, so that anyone who wants to contact someone can look up their phone-number in the list. Not only is it trivially easy to find names, it's trivially easy to contact the people those names belong to and give them orders. Becoming Queen of the mortal world, for someone with a vassaled fairy and a telephone, could be less than an afternoon's work."

He stares off into space and shakes his head. "The phone book... is a powerful artifact that grants the wielder absolute control over the human race. The phone book."

This is the state of affairs concerning the universe, apparently. He shakes his head in disbelief some more.

"How long did you say it would take to make a gate?"

[imeanforever]

"Well, I don't know, exactly, since I don't currently know how and haven't marked it on my schedule as a project. More than days, probably less than months."

[unblinkered]

"...that's going to be a long time to go without eating anything, and an impossible time to go without drinking- is water typically safe to drink?"

It's also a long time to go with a potential world domination attempt in progress, or at least a very-nasty-behavior-requiring-magical-coercion attempt in progress. The fairy, though, is more likely to be concerned with his immediate well being than...

It's actually weird that fairies haven't already tried to take over the world on their own, come to think of it. It'd be insulting if none of them cared enough to try.

[imeanforever]

"Water's safe if that's all it is. I know where to get you safe water."

[unblinkered]

"Speaking of water..."

They've reached the river.

"I don't... rivers come from... I'm not even going to start questioning the geology of this pl- wait, if it just goes on forever, how can there be a consistent water cycle? How does it regulate the... are ecosystems even stable over long time periods here?"

Max doesn't necessarily care, and suspects the answer is going to be some variation on "it's magic", but that's not reason to not ask the question. Not asking a question is like... not thinking a thought.

[imeanforever]

"Don't drink the river water," she recommends. "This particular river comes from a spring up on a mountain that way, and the spring would be safe to drink from, but between here and there it picks up enough detritus that it's not completely pure. I have safe water at home."

[unblinkered]

"Do people here get possessive about their river detritus? Random strangers in the habit of giving mortals orders just to check if they've accidentally swallowed some of their trash? Or... do fairies have a sense for when someone becomes vassaled to them?"

He walks down the river bank, looking for a good place to cross. She'll probably point it out when he reaches it.

[imeanforever]

"We have that sense about names but not about the food thing, but mortals are uncommon and interesting enough that someone might well test orders on you to see if they've got an incidental claim like that. Especially if you don't look taken, or only taken by a very new leaflet with no vassals of her own to bring to bear." She points out a shallow swath of river with tall rocks. "Can you wade that?"

[unblinkered]

He shrugs. He's never waded across a river before, but there's no reason he shouldn't be able to. Besides how there's lots of quickly-moving water and rocks and it seems like a generally risky thing to do.

He takes off his socks and shoes and folds his slacks around them. After a moment, he takes off his suitjacket and buttons it closed around the bundle.

"D'you mind carrying these across?"

[imeanforever]

She shrugs, takes the bundle, and flies across the river with it to wait perched on a rock on the other side.

[unblinkered]

...it's probably not a safe assumption that a fairy wouldn't lie about being unable to carry him in order to trick him into wading half-naked through a river for laughs, in general. But Promise doesn't seem the type to do something like that. He's sure.

The river water is cold and the riverbed is gross and squishy and the river is moving very fast and it's rather harder to stay upright than he expected. Not harder than it would have been if he had been properly modeling it as a massive wall of liquid falling horizontally as opposed to a thin band of wet, but harder than he was expecting nonetheless.

Halfway through he slips and smashes his head against a rock. Not hard enough to knock him out, but hard enough to get him stunned and washed downstream a few meters before catching himself on another rock.

What a colorful vocabulary he has.

[imeanforever]

Promise puts his bundle down and flits over to the rock, and hovers over him. "...I can help pull you back to the shallow bit, if you think having me hauling on your hand would be more use than using it to swim," she says. "Or I can try to get you - branches or something?"

[unblinkered]

"I'm FINE! I- ffffuck, I just didn't know the rock would wobble, I- bollocks, I can-"

Wait, no. Help is good. Asking people for help is fine and a good idea and reduces the probability of drowning. He'd lost track of this, on account of the head injury.

He grabs her hand. "Iz... izzit bleeding, christ, I can't tell if it's bleeding..."

[imeanforever]

Promise has a bit more difficulty hovering when he's got hold of her hand, but she manages. "A bit. It doesn't look huge, just enthusiastic. I know a healing spell that should work on you but I don't have it completely memorized, I'd have to look it up."

[unblinkered]

Maxwell groans some unintelligible expression of assent. Swimming back to the shallow water is difficult, but he suffers no further complications on the way to the far shore. He retrieves his bundle of clothes- he'll have to wait til he's dry to put them on.

He ties one of his socks around his head. They're clean enough, he put them on this morning. That's how hygiene works. Definitely.

"Healing spell. Also very complicated, specialized magic. I'm... going to need to understand the fundamentals of this before I can decide what sorts of things ought to be surprising, now."

[imeanforever]

"The one I'm thinking of is simple," Promise says. "Introductory."

[unblinkered]

"Well, yes, sure. I meant- in the context of- bodies are complicated and medical magic in general sounds..."

He's not sure if it's the head injury diminishing his willingness to press the issue, or hunger. He stops talking, walking along in silence. Questions can wait for when his head isn't swimming anymore. It appears it didn't get the memo about the rest of the body being done with that.

[imeanforever]

Forest forest forest specific hawthorn tree with a door in it.

"I'm afraid you'll be cramped, although you should be able to fit," she says, opening the door for him.

[unblinkered]

Max ducks under the doorway- it's just a little too short- and steps inside. Of the tree. With a house in it, that gave birth to a yada yada yada magic. He's resolved to postpone his magical-mechanics inquiries for the books.

He locates seating and slumps. "Walking. Back home I don't have to do that so much."

Back home he also didn't ford rivers or acquire head injuries, but those things weren't strictly typicaly parts of getting around in this place.

[imeanforever]

"I don't walk much either, though I suppose it's for different reasons. The water in that pitcher," she adds, pointing at a glass vessel on what appears to be the fairy treehouse equivalent of a kitchen table, "is safe for you if you're thirsty."