Chapter 1: Stranded

She has no choice but to face the situation she was in. The passage was closed, the spell she had used to open it in the first place wasn't working, and she was stuck on the side of it on which she wasn't supposed to be. What was going to happen if she didn't wake up in the morning? Lalli was definitely going to check on her, and notice she wasn't in her safe area. Even if Lalli managed to bring her back to where she belonged, both he and her parents were going to be furious at her. She had promised them that she would be on her best behavior in Mora, but in the end, she hadn't been able to keep herself from trying out some of the more powerful spells from Lalli's notes, on the off-chance one of them would help solve her problem a little sooner. One of those spells had turned out to open a passage to a place that she was probably never meant to see, which had only made it more exciting to visit. Having the voices of the trapped ones go completely quiet for the first time in more than a year while she was there had been an extra bonus. Tears rolled out of her eyes as she informed the actual owner of the safe area she was currently in of the situation:
-I can't leave. The spell isn't working, and I know it's the right one. I made sure to learn it in case something like that happened. Someone is going to need to come and get me, and they will find out I've been coming here.
Her "aunt" came to kneel at the edge of the river next to her and put a hand on her shoulder:
-At least, you're trapped somewhere safe. I've been told that mages sometimes get cast out of their safe areas and become lost forever. But we should really let your Lalli know you're here, in case he doesn't figure it out on his own. Is it okay if I tell Reynir so he can tell our Lalli?
She hadn't met this world's Lalli yet but had heard enough about him from her "aunt" to be aware that he was in contact with the Lalli she knew, via a connection of sorts between their minds. She also realized that as uneasy as she was about the idea of facing Lalli and her parents, she liked the idea of being stuck in the mind of her "aunt" even less. She nodded in response to the question. Her "aunt" disappeared, having woken up.

Even after a month of visiting regularly, she still had trouble keeping track of how the adults she knew were paired in this other reality. Some, including her own parents, were still with the same people. Others were with different people entirely, but still good friends with the person who was their spouse in her own world. Fortunately, if one ignored the half-dozen of apparently interchangeable children Emil's cousins had produced between them, her own generation's situation was easier to remember. Janine had been born earlier and fathered by someone else. Her own younger brother had been born at the time he should have been but was still a baby because this reality was five years late on her own. She, herself, hadn't been born. The best guess she and her "aunt" had been able to come up with between them was that it had something to do with the fact that her parents had married later in this reality, even when accounting for the five-year discrepancy. The realization had been hard to stomach for both of them at the time, even though they had found Lalli unlikely to have seen that particular situation coming when he had arranged for his desired divergence between the two realities. In the end, that hadn't kept her and her "aunt" from wanting to spend time together, albeit with a few newly-established rules about what information they could spontaneously share with each other. On her side, it had mostly meant doing her best to avoid mentioning any long-term situation that was less than five years old. However, the realization had also made them even more certain that anyone finding out about her visits would promptly put a stop to them. Even with the rules in place, they had found endless things to tell each other about, be it something they had done during the past few days or the books they had read.

As she started getting cold, she got up from the river's edge and quickly found her "aunt's" military skald quarters. Her "aunt" was very far away from them in the real world, and missed them greatly, despite the fact that she had come to her current location with the intention of it becoming her new home. She personally didn't mind, as the situation gave her the only accessible place where she could fully escape the voices of the trapped ones, with the extra bonus of the familiarity of Keuruu's civilian quarters. Her "aunt's" quarters weren't very far away from the house in which she had grown up with her father, mother and little brother, but she now knew better than to try to go in there. The way it was arranged, to accommodate two parents and a baby instead of a family of four physically autonomous individuals, made for too radical a reminder of the fact that she was both an intruder and a time-traveler of sorts in this reality. By the time the stove had started doing its job warming up the room, she heard her "aunt" calling her from outside. She opened the door and peeked outside:
-Over here! I put the oven on!
Her "aunt" came into the room, two familiar-looking men in tow. The long-braided green-eyed redhead who could only be this reality's version of Reynir stared at her wide-eyed, while this reality's version of Lalli, dressed in scouting gear instead of the nicer clothes in which she was used to seeing him, looked at her with a complete lack of surprise. He was the first of the three to speak to her:
-He should really get a more recent photo of you. I didn't realize that you were already that old. I'm afraid I have bad news for you. My own connection to your world has vanished during the night. I don't know the exact time because I was working when it happened. I never bothered finding out how he made it in the first place, but I live near a library that will be much more helpful for fixing your problem than any place Tuuri can easily get to right now. I will need you in my safe area to help me.
Once she had processed what she had been told, accepting this Lalli's offer came across as her best option so far. However, she was surprised that any version of Lalli would care so little about his connection to another reality as to not want to find out how it was working. Her "aunt" had once pointed out that the passage had technically been imposed upon the version of Lalli who hadn't created it, but still.

While crossing the dream-sea, she was told to stay right behind Reynir and step on the water ripples he left behind him, but to do so quickly because they faded fast. It was only when she got to the swamp in which the closest thing to solid ground was a duckwalk that turned out to be this Lalli's safe area that she realized she hadn't thought things through. And of course, the voices of the trapped ones were back, if faded compared to when she was awake in her own body. This was due to Lalli being in a Keuruu with a smaller surrounding cleansed area than her own, but also from a time at which her magical hearing wasn't as sensitive. The duckwalk led to small pond with a circle-shaped raft floating on it. The way the raft was built caused its center to be hollow. Lalli pointed at the water visible through the hollow center of the raft:
-This is where my passage to your world used to be. I'd rather have it there again if we end up having to re-build it ourselves.
She nodded. She only noticed Reynir was still present when he spoke:
-Do you mind if I come here to check on her from time to time, so Tuuri doesn't get too worried?
Lalli promptly answered:
-Go ahead. You may even need to bring her back to Tuuri's place if we don't manage to get her back to her world soon. I don't think having her here more than two days in a row will be good for either of us, and I'd like to fix this without Onni or Cecilia ever seeing her if I can.
Lalli then turned to her:
-I hope you understand and are okay with this.
She nodded again. She already knew of the side-effect her presence in this place was going to have on Lalli, and she didn't particularly want to run into this reality's version of her parents either. Reynir gave his farewell and left. She fully realized that this was the first time she was having more than a quick glance at Reynir's upper body when she noticed the empty right sleeve that had somehow escaped her attention so far, despite her "aunt" having told her about it. She was soon alone on the raft with Lalli:
-I need to wake up and explain to a few people who know of your world why I'm going to need some time off from work. We'll go to the library after that. Bye.
Lalli vanished.

Emil hadn't exactly planned to stay up all night, but fate had had other ideas. As shops in Mora were starting to open and a few workers were leaving their houses, he was going back to the small one he and Lalli had been pressured to move into when the newly appointed general in charge of the cleansers had found out who they were and decreed that it was unacceptable for "such important people" to be living in a small apartment. Lalli had been reluctant at first but been won over by the garden with a healthy tree in it. Having a room that was Lalli's study, and only Lalli's study, had been an extra argument in favor of moving. However, by the standards of Lalli's side of the family, the house was big enough to allow them to take in Onni's ten-year-old daughter who had very suddenly needed to be moved out of Keuruu almost a couple months ago. Emil had ended up getting along with her surprisingly well, and Lalli, in spite of his own obvious soft spot for her, kept insisting that it was only because of the tolerance he had built up when his cousins were younger. As he came into the kitchen, he realized it gave no sign of having been used recently. One of the girl's saving graces was that she was usually able to take care of herself in the morning without leaving too much of a mess, and always looked forward to going to school. Emil found her still asleep in her bedroom, and gently tried to rouse her by shaking her shoulder:
-Hey, Tuuri, wake up, you're going to be late for school.
After doing everything he could think of to wake her up and not seeing her move a single muscle that wasn't required to breathe, he decided to get her to the hospital as quickly as he could, suddenly feeling like a tremendous idiot for not having checked on her before leaving. This couldn't be happening. He had just come back from the hospital after taking Lalli there the previous night.

xxxx

Tuuri's state was deemed even more inexplicable than Lalli's, as the doctor found nothing wrong with her. Even in the half-dazed state he was in at this point, Emil figured out what that meant: her reckless attempts to perform magic she wasn't ready for during her sleep had finally caught up with her. Emil went to see Lalli to share that information with him after Tuuri got admitted into the hospital. Lalli replied that he was too weak to leave his own safe area, which made it impossible for him to check on Tuuri's actual situation. They briefly considered that Tuuri's state could be the cause of Lalli's rather than what Emil had come to suspect the previous evening, quickly agreeing that actually checking on her would be required to get confirmation either way. He and Lalli agreed to get another mage to check on Tuuri. The first step was to look for any mages who could be temporarily staying in Mora or the rest of Sweden, as they would be closer than their usually trusted quartet of Onni, Cecilia, Reynir and Helena. Emil was going to need to have a second talk with the people behind the new radio wave-based anti-troll system, whose answers the previous night upon being asked to turn their equipment off had entered two broad categories: "you can't prove our defense system has anything to do with that man's condition" and "we don't see the problem with our system being possibly anti-Finn in addition to anti-troll". He realized he was going to walk quite close to the school on his way to Mora's military headquarters and decided to go tell the headmistress that Tuuri wasn't going to be able to attend school for at least the next couple of days while he was in the area.

As he arrived in front of the school, he found the headmistress there, talking with a dozen of other people he recognized as parents he had seen around the school before. He decided to stand nearby while waiting for them to finish. From the dregs of conversation that he picked up, he eventually realized that all twelve of the parents had a child that had either been kept home, or that the headmistress was trying to send home, for the same reasons: complaints about a constant ringing sound inside their heads giving them headaches. He was too tired to find a polite way to approach this, and he needed to know:
-Excuse me, but when did all of your children go to sleep?
All had gone to sleep before the time at which the radio-wave defense system was to be activated for the first time. He soon found out that the children's complaints about the ringing had started this very morning. He had all the parents give him their names and addresses, informed the headmistress that Tuuri was ill, told the other parents about Lalli's crippling headache, and got himself to headquarters as quickly as he could manage.