Garin is not anywhere close to recovered, in the long term. She has lost a good chunk of her left hand, walks with a limp, and insists on self-medicating with coffee, alcohol, and a declared visit to that young Dirk fellow to see if he's as immoral as he claims. However, she can walk, and does, and is once more out at the fountain, armed with pencils, high quality paper, and an attitude of really wanting to understand a thing. Occasionally she needs to lean on Dirk, but she does not seem attached to him, in any sense.

Dirk is leaned on and supports Garin. He drinks from a flask.

Garin takes the flask sometimes. She also has one, and uses them interchangeably.

Amy and the hospital staff have been keeping an eye on Garin. Perhaps surprisingly, they don't even try to keep her in, letting her out to wander as she wishes. Hey, there's healing and then there's ... healing. At this point, Amy is actually just walking by the fountain, heading for the inn. She pauses though, as she catches sight of Garin and Dirk. "hey," she greets with a smile. "What's up?"

Garin answers, "Need more coffee. But I think I know a thing now. First off, this is impossible under all the laws I know. That's very interesting." She is wrapped up against the cold, in courtly clothes that are useless for hiking in.

Dirk nods "I want my little girl back "

Amy arches a brow at that. "Well, that might be true, about the laws. But here we are. There's coffee at the hospital and the inn, I'm not sure where else."

Garin shrugs. "Drugs are good. I do like them. But not needed on duty. There's no magical connection except there is. And I have to look at it sideways." She glares. "And without a wand."

Dirk looks at both of the women and opens his mouth just to shut it.

Amy has to chuckle slightly. "Confusing, isn't it?" she says. "It gives those of us used to magic fits." She then says, "Which, I generally just have healing magic, and it seems to work reasonably well."

The stocky woman shakes her head, musingly. "Bits work. And then I come up against something that isn't even a restatement of the world. It's just wrong. But... maybe it's not, because it's not pushing against things that no longer exist. Like, if you didn't have to keep Amber in tension against everything else, what would happen?" Garin looks half annoyed, half fascinated.

Of course this has Amy thinking. "Mind you, I won't say that healing magic works /the same/ as it did, but it works." She wrinkles her nose, and shrugs. "I mean, if you didn't have to keep something in tension, wouldn't it spread?" she asks.

Dirk says "Maybe whatever is anti Amber spread?"

"Maybe it'd shrink. Maybe just change. Where I'm from, all magic flows through Amber eventually. What if it couldn't, and it ended up turned on itself?" Garin stares at the fountain, where there is now a complicated red sigil around the edge, done in greaseproof pencil, or wax of some kind.

Amy nods to Dirk. "Maybe? We really don't know what happened. When we started to wake up here, it was up the hill at the switchback. And that was all there was. We learned slowly to push the fog back, and we've opened up - well, whatever is here and not fog covered," she says slowly. She eyes the fountain though, curiously. "What is that red sigil? I don't remember that," she admits. They were working in hair and red cloth, after all.

"It's a holding pattern. Well, a few. I've layered them." Garin limps forward to point with her hip flask - or maybe Dirk's - at some of the complicated squiggles. "Mostly I had to assume magic would work as intended, so all of this folds up anything that comes through, as it approaches the edges, and tries to put it upwards. It'll hold for most things. The next layer..." These squiggles flow less, sit much more squarely. "... these are to see if anything pushes at the edges, but they don't seem to be recording anything. They'd alart anyone I keyed it to - IF things worked properly. As is, they'll just blare really loudly in the key of Magical Siren and I'm around the bottom end of town. I should be able to respond. I'd give King Oberon's nutsack for a decent broomstick, mind."

Dirk says, "I just want to push back into Arden."

Garin looks up at Dirk. "That bad. Is Prince Julian a vampire here?"

"you'd have to find it first," Amy murmurs, with amusement showing. She considers for a moment, "Okay, so that's basically an alarm in case anything from that ice world tries to come here?" She then blinks, eyes widening. "Heck if we know. I don't think any of us have seen one of those elders at all yet. Well, unless that spider thing was one, like Danielle thought."

Dirk says "No idea."

Dirk says, "In my past life I was an Arden ranger."

"Anyway. The last layer's a ward in case any dumb people try to approach it from *this* side, and it just pushes them back. Also handily keeps dust off carpets, if you do a really lightweight version of it. See how that's a bit like the middle, but a reversal? It's mostly powered by siphoning off what's here in Amber. The control structure for it's a bit spread out around the whole fountain. Normally I'd make it a single glyph set with its own protections, but cobblestones are a bastard to write on." Garin gives Dirk a sympathetic look. "The rangers pulled my fat out of the fire a few times. But I still can't like the forests. It's all so irregular. They put the trees wherever they like!"

Amy pays attention to what she's told, learning a bit, perhaps. Though the concepts at least seem to be familiar to her. "Right, that makes sense too. Keeping it all safe, even if it's not supposed to be there. That much I think is clear. I'm still not sure at all - hey, was it you telling us that you didn't want to war anymore? Because if not, we still have a mystery to solve."\

Dirk says, "no one put the trees anywhere Arden is the forest primeval."

Garin replies, "I'm going to need some more context. An ice queen was stealing my voice, I was probably drunk if I wasn't fighting, and I've slept since then." Dirk gets a friendly, but non-agreeing, pat on the shoulder. It seems like Garin does not like forests.

Amy shrugs. "No, before that. There was like a message through the fountain," Amy says. "like it was written there, and someone was saying they were tired of war. We didn't know who it was, but there was the barman over in the ice palace." She pauses, and then has to shrug. "I'm mangling it, but certainly we didn't understand it at all."

"Not me at all. I stopped living like a freak in a cellar when someone tweaked a tag I'd left around. The one who cut her hair for the first round of red here." Garin pulls herself to fully upright once more, pretends she did not slump momentarily.

"That's Danielle," Amy says with a nod. "I'm Amy, and your leaning post there is Dirk." Just in case. "And right, but that's how we were at the palace to find your tag."

Dirk offers Garin his flask and arm. "I need to start arranging the underworld again. Gotta keep it in the family."

"Mhm. So, I might have a thing for you there. When-and-where I was from... no thanks, it's going straight to my head right now - Amber basically kept the world together with huge magical contracts. Amber made trading pacts, and the King made the magical ones - it flowed back and forth. If something like this damned black fog happened when there was a war, maybe a contract got broken. Or even badly fixed in a state of war. I think there's a power there. Maybe the head of state, maybe not. But there's something central, then factions."

Dirk says, "All over my head, for sure."

"Well, someone needs to get those Unicorn cults under control, between you, Kyrie and Mortimer," Amy replies to Dirk. "They keep fighting each other when they should be working together." And then she turns to Garin, thoughtfully. "Magical contract - oh. Well, that might take us a while to figure out. Though the bartender, as I understand it, did tell us to find the ships. We don't have any here yet - can't see past the bay."

Dirk says, "Can we justvkill them?"

Garin shrugs. "I didn't go into the bar. I'd have died drunk, but I'd still have died. There are hostiles in that place as well as allies. I want... damnit. There I go thinking I ..." Then she catches up with Dirk. "Kill who? Citizens of Amber? I've seen how that goes. Usually badly."

Amy looks over to Garin. "You want what?" she asks. "Look so far as we can tell here, we're all in this together. And that includes you, if you want."

Dirk says, "I am just a soldier, sailor and pirate. Just aim me where you need me to go and let me do what I do best... and then the penguins"

Garin sighs. "I was going to say I want to punch through to the middle, but that means bringing in a lot of people. Someone's got to be a grown-up and tell me not to kill you all in trying." She jerks a thumb at Dirk. "Like that one. I hated getting promoted."

Amy blinks at that, and then she says, "As the Healer of the group, I hereby deny all requests that will kill us or the inhabitants of Amber." Then she takes a breath, and adds, "Dirk, if you want your underworld to flourish, don't you kind of need people?"

Dirk nods "Yes but I was talking about the unicorn cultists not generic everyone.

"Right. So we're not going to punch into the centre of that place unless and until we're ready. But I'm pretty sure there's a magical centre. I don't know if it's the mundane centre." Garin closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, opens them again. "Cultists... you generally need to knock out the top and then give them something new to believe in. Not penguins."

Dirk says "Why can't they believe in penguins and puffins?"

Amy laughs. "I see you're getting to know Dirk really well," she teases gently. "I think that's what Mortimer and Kyrie are working on." At Dirk's next comment, she shrugs her shoulders. "We need them to be helpful, really."

Dirk says, "Birbs are helpful."

"Because penguins betray you. And wander into your path when you're trying to get away from ice bastards." Garin seems very solid on that, at least. "So... leaving aside the young lovely's feather fetish, this situation's under control here but hell knows what's at the other end. I'd like to put down a planter, at least."

Dirk is a young lovely? "A planter of what?"

"A magical tag. In this case, a listening device in the bar, or maybe a few of them here and there, to give us an early warning if anything big changes. A couple of rooms started thawing while I was there." Garin yawns, looks annoyed.

Amy blinks and tilts her head. "They can be helpful, but not the way we need," she says softly to Dirk. "And what did you have in mind by way of an underground then?" That said, she turns to Garin. "What he said." Planter? Wait, what? "We kind of wanted to find out who it was who was trying to contact us, and see if we could maybe help each other. I wonder if it is a magical contract, if resetting it might not help start to stabilize things a bit more?"

Dirk is drinking because he can't magic. "I need an unofficial trade and intelligence organization. I am Caine spawn after all."

"Depends a lot on the contract, and also on what else is in Amber, and what the fu.. what the damned rules are. Court language, Garin, not field language... And I can try to follow this ice thing back, but then, so can anyone else. I'm just the one hanging around here."

Dirk says, "Cuss all you want, my young lovely ears don't mind."

"And the cults couldn't be the start of that?" Amy suggests easily. "I mean, I think if you want to start building that, by all means." That to Dirk, with a smile. Then to Garin, she says, "You're not quite ready yet to go back to that ice cold place. Stay a little bit longer and rest up. Then we can go back together if you want. When we found you, it took us some time to find the place through the fog. But we did find a few other places - that seem to be just little - I don't know, dreams maybe - stuck in the fog."

Dirk looks at Amy, "You just don't want me to kill anyone. Not like I was really going to. I'll kill monsters near the forest "

"Well, if you kill them, they can't help very well," Amy observes. "So you're right. I don't."

"I wouldn't want to get into the habit. I'm barely presentable at a decent court anyhow." Garin nods to Amy. "I know. But I like this place. Does the Duke have a huge palace up near the big hat? The Royal Palace? Or... wait, not the Duke here. Never mind. That means no grand archive there."

"There is a library in the royal palace," Amy says. "But it's a small one."

"I'll look. But for now, bed. Alone." Garin turns to stump off, hardly pale at all.

Dirk says "Be safe, I promise no killing and if I can't have penguins maybe I'll try flying coconuts."

Amy laughs, a bright musical sound. "Alright then. On that note, I'm going to head up to the inn. Later."

Dirk says "see you later."