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

[unblinkered]

"And- is it a planet? Ball of ground, floating in space, orbiting that sun there? How big is it?"

[imeanforever]

"It's not a planet. And - big. I'm not sure if it's literally infinite, but big enough that no one's sure."

[unblinkered]

He ponders this. He gives up pondering it and files it under "weird magic things that don't strictly make sense and probably have some common artificiality behind them".

"So- fairies. You, uh... there's the wings, but... why do you look like humans? Or, I guess, why do humans look like you? What's the connection there?"

[imeanforever]

"I don't know. Leaflets look more humanlike than many kinds of fairies, but it's all the same basic shape, none of us look like snails or rocks instead. It's possible some breeding kinds wandered into the mortal world long ago and - bred there. I don't know much about how breeding kinds work but that seems the likeliest explanation."

[unblinkered]

"Breeding kinds?" he asks, before changing his mind and asking "So- the mortal world, you say- is it just this place and our place? Are there other worlds with..." Fairies, what else would there be? "I don't know, dragons, or elves or something? Is the connection between here and there special, or is there a wider context?"

[imeanforever]

"As far as I know it's just the fairy realm and the mortal one," says Promise.

[unblinkered]

So. Okay, things make slightly more sense to Max now. The laws of physics are still probably being violated, insofar as flying and parallel universes go, but... in neat, isolated ways, that can probably be described neatly. Except for the vassal thing, which may or may not be a bluff but could, theoretically, be attributed to some very clever nanotechnology. The rules are being broken, but they aren't a totally different set of rules. Probably.

"So... so back to the breeding kinds thing- we're mortals, okay, so by contrast, you're... not mortal? But, what, only some of you reproduce? How's all that... work, biologically speaking?"

[imeanforever]

"I don't know how breeding kinds work. I'm not a bred kind."

[unblinkered]

A sickening feeling grows in his stomach. Or maybe that's just hunger. Please, please let that not mean anything weird and magic.

"What... do you mean, you're not a bred kind? Where did you...?"

[imeanforever]

"I started in my tree. That's where leaflets come from."

[unblinkered]

no no no no no no no please

"Your tree. You... how did the tree... where I come from, trees don't typically... make people. Is that a euphemism for...?"

[imeanforever]

"It's not a euphemism for anything. I assume we have different trees. The kind of tree in question makes leaflets occasionally."

[unblinkered]

Deep breaths.

"...how does it make leaflets occasionally? Are you... is it some kind of symbiotic... are fairies a species, or a category of... but?"

[imeanforever]

"I'm not sure I understand what you're asking. The tree hollows out in the middle and when there's enough room a leaflet starts in it. That's where we're going, is my tree, with my house in it. I don't have to live there any more, if I wanted to move I could, but it's convenient and no one else is going to make trouble with me over my tree, so I do."

[unblinkered]

"What I mean is... I'm trying to get a handle on this place as... a model of my world, with a list of deviations from that model, to be explained by some common cause or set of causes. And... you have a magic vassal system, teleporting gates, wings that hold a person's weight, a non-planetoid geology, and now... now I need to figure out trees that generate people. There's... there's a vanishingly small set of explanations that account for these increasingly bizarre and seemingly unrelated phenomena."

He throws up his hands.

"What else is there? Have I not even encountered the most... inexplicable thing, yet? What is this place?!"

[imeanforever]

"It's the fairy realm," says Promise. "Why are you starting out by modeling the mortal world at all to understand it?"

[unblinkered]

There's a sputtering noise in the back of his throat.

"You- I mean, of course that's the problem, is that I only have the one frame of reference! I somehow thought... there was a universe with consistent rules, that existed because that was just how the rules happened to play out! But this... what are its rules? Does it have rules? If there are rules, does anyone know what they are? Where did... where'd it all come from?"

[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?"