Chapter Text
The thing about not sleeping for forty-eight hours is that at some point, the tiredness stops being a feeling and becomes numb, becoming something part of your nature. Powder had crossed that threshold somewhere around hour thirty-six, sitting in the back row of the library’s fourth floor, surrounded by five empty cans of Monster Energy drinks (the blue ones, of course) and two textbooks that started to read as if in hieroglyphics. Her Dynamics of Robotic Systems midterm was due, and she had not slept. She had barely eaten. She had, at one point, seriously considered whether licking the flavor dust off a bag of Doritos counted as good enough.
But she'd made it to past that!
She walked into that exam hall at 8:00 AM sharp, slid into her seat, and proceeded to fill in every single answer with manic confidence, somehow fueled. Two hours later, she walked, handed in her paper, and felt absolutely nothing.
That had been hours ago. Now it was around 1:00 PM on a Thursday afternoon, and Powder was walking home. Not taking the subway, not hopping on a bus, walking, because she'd somehow convinced her sleep-deprived brain that the walk would clear her head. What it actually did was make her legs feel like they were made of wet cement and her eyes sting every time the wind blew.
New York in autumn was doing its whole thing. The trees lining the streets were going gold and red, the air had that crispness that made everyone suddenly remember scarves existed, and the sun was hitting the buildings at that low afternoon angle that turned the streets into stained glass. Powder noticed approximately none of this. Powder was operating on pure autopilot, muscle memory carrying her body through the streets she'd walked a hundred times before.
Her phone buzzed in her jacket pocket. She fished it out with fingers that fumbled twice before managing to grip the thing properly.
A text from Vi.
Vi: how'd the exam go
Powder typed back with one thumb, not breaking stride.
Powder: i either aced it or im gonna fake a crisis and get that dropped
Powder: heading home now
Powder: going to sleep for maybe 200 years
Vi: lmao eat something first
Vi: cait says she left groceries at ur place yesterday. check the fridge
Powder: i think im so tired i feel the desire to express that caits tolerable sometimes
Vi: ill pass that along. get some rest blue
Powder shoved her phone back in her pocket and turned the last corner onto her street.
Her building was one of those newer luxury high-rises that had sprouted up along the waterfront in the last decade, all glass and steel and sharp angles, the kind of place that Powder absolutely could not afford on her own. But Powder didn't live here on her own dime. Powder lived here because her sister was dating Caitlyn Kiramman, and Caitlyn Kiramman heard that her girlfriend's little sister was going to be attending university in the city and said, "Well, she simply cannot live in some awful dormitory," and then just handed over the keys to a one-bedroom apartment on the twenty-third floor with floor-to-ceiling windows and a view of the water like it was nothing. Like that was a normal thing to do for someone you'd only known for a year at that point.
Powder had protested until she'd seen the view.
The lobby was all polished marble and soft lighting. Powder waved vaguely at Darius, the doorman, who raised an eyebrow at her. Fair enough. She probably looked like she'd crawled out of a dumpster. Her blue hair, which normally fell in two long braids past her shoulders or organized space buns, was sticking up in directions that defied both gravity and reason. Her oversized NYU Engineering hoodie was stained with what she thought was coffee but might have been ink. Her jeans had a hole in the knee that she was pretty sure hadn't been there before.
The elevator ride up was twenty-three floors of Powder leaning her forehead against the cool metal wall and wondering if she could fall asleep standing up. The answer was yes, but the doors dinged open before she could fully test the theory.
Her hallway. Her door. Her keys, which she dropped twice before successfully getting them into the lock. The door swung open and Powder stepped inside, already in the process of kicking off her beat-up converse that she drew occasionally on, already reaching for the light switch, already thinking about her bed, her beautiful, glorious bed with its pile of blankets and the body pillow.
She got two steps inside.
The air did something. It shifted, it crackled, it became heavy and electric all at once, like the pressure change before a thunderstorm but compressed into a single second. The hair on her arms stood up. The hair on her head stood up. The lights in the entryway flickered once, twice, and then there was a sound like fabric tearing, except the fabric was reality itself, and a burst of white-gold light exploded in the middle of her living room.
Powder had exactly 0.3 seconds to process this before something fell out of the light and slammed directly into her.
The impact knocked her flat on her back. Her head hit the hardwood floor with a crack that sent stars spinning across her vision. The weight on top of her was warm and solid and very much a person-shaped thing, and Powder's brain, already running on fumes and static, simply could not compute what was happening. It tried. It really tried.
The light vanished and the crackling stopped. The apartment was silent except for Powder's wheezing breaths and the quiet, pained groan of whoever was currently lying on top of her.
Powder blinked at the ceiling. Then she tilted her chin down and blinked at the person.
Blonde hair—a lot of it. It spilled everywhere like liquid gold, across Powder's chest, her shoulders, the floor around them. A face that was pressed into the crook of Powder's neck, warm breath against her skin. Something hard and metallic was digging into Powder's ribs, something that felt distinctly like armor. And there was a stick, a long, ornate stick or staff or something, that had clattered to the floor beside them and was pulsing with a faint golden light that was slowly fading.
"What," Powder said to her ceiling, very quietly, far too calm given the circumstance.
The person on top of her stirred and pushed themselves up on their arms. And Powder found herself staring directly into the prettiest eyes she had ever seen in her entire life.
They were impossibly blue, brighter and more saturated than any eye color had a right to be. They were wide and dazed and rimmed with lashes so long they were actually absurd, and the face they belonged to was, without exaggeration, the most beautiful face Powder had ever seen online or in person. Right here, six inches from her own face, real and warm and breathing. Delicate features. High cheekbones. A small nose, slightly upturned. Pink lips parted in confusion. All of it framed by that impossible golden hair.
Powder's brain, again working on hour forty-eight of no sleep and maybe three remaining brain cells, assessed the situation and produced the following conclusion: she was hallucinating. This was a hallucination. She had walked into her apartment, hit her head on something (the doorframe? the coat rack? unclear), and was now lying on the floor having a very vivid, very gorgeous hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation and exam stress.
That was the only reasonable explanation. Because the alternative was that a glowing portal had opened in her living room and deposited what appeared to be an actual angel on top of her, and that was simply not a thing that happened in real life.
"Oh," Powder stated, still flat on her back, staring up at this golden apparition. "Okay. I’ve clearly gone insane already."
The angel (because that was what she was, obviously, an angel, what with the golden hair and the blue eyes and the literal glowing and the falling from the sky aspect of this whole situation) blinked. Her brow furrowed. "I... what? Where am I? What happened?"
Her voice was soft and bewildered, with an accent that Powder couldn't quite place. Not quite British, not quite anything she recognized. It had a formal quality to it, and was pretty. Of course it was pretty. Everything about this hallucination was pretty.
"You're in my apartment," Powder informed her, making no move to get up, mostly because she was pinned under this person but partly because she genuinely wasn't sure her legs would support her even if she tried. "I haven't slept in forty-eight hours, I took an exam that may have actually killed me, and I'm pretty sure I'm having some kind of psychotic break right now. Sorry."
The angel was pushing herself up now, getting her hands flat on the floor on either side of Powder's head, lifting her weight off Powder's chest. In doing so, she gave Powder a better look at what she was wearing. It was armor, confirmed. Actual, literal armor. Light and ornate, silver and white and blue with gold detailing, shaped in ways that suggested it was custom-fitted. There was a short cape or half-cloak thing attached at one shoulder, and beneath the armor, some kind of fitted dark garment. It was beautiful and completely insane and absolutely did not belong in New York.
"I don't understand," the angel sounded truly confused. She was looking around now, taking in Powder's apartment. The flat-screen TV on the wall. The kitchen with its stainless steel appliances and marble countertops. The floor-to-ceiling windows with their view of the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge. The bookshelves stuffed with engineering textbooks and art history volumes and random novels. The desk in the corner covered in sketches and half-built mechanical projects and scattered tools. "This isn't where I was trying to go. I was casting the transportation spell, but it wasn't supposed to bring me here. I don't even know where here is."
She looked back down at Powder, seemed to fully register for the first time that she had landed on an actual human being, and immediately scrambled off with a clumsy urgency that involved accidentally kneeing Powder in the thigh in the process.
"Oh! I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to land on you, are you hurt? Is your head all right? I heard it hit the floor, that was quite a sound, I'm really very sorry about all of this, I just can't figure out what happened with the spell..."
"Hey, hey, it's fine, relax," Powder said, waving a hand from her position on the floor. She made no attempt to get up yet. The floor was solid and stable and not spinning, which was more than she could say for the rest of the world right now. "I've had worse. My friend Ekko hit me in the face with a drone last week."
The angel (hallucination? person? unclear) was kneeling beside her now, hands hovering like she wanted to help but wasn't sure where to put them. Those blue eyes were filled with genuine concern, which was sweet, even for a figment of Powder's imagination.
Powder took a moment to just look at her again. The details were too sharp for a dream, too consistent for a hallucination. The slight flush across the angel's cheeks. A tiny scar near her left eyebrow, barely visible. The way her hair fell in patterns, not in some idealized perfect wave but with a few tangles and flyaways. The dirt smudged on her collarbone, just visible above the collar of her undershirt where the armor didn't cover.
Huh.
Interesting.
"Who are you?" Powder asked. "And what are you?"
The angel sat back on her heels, took a breath, and seemed to center herself. Some of the panic left her face, replaced by a more composed expression.
"My name is Luxanna Crownguard," she introduced. "You can call me Lux. I'm a light mage. I come from a kingdom called Demacia, in Runeterra. I was attempting to use a transportation spell to move across my country, but something went very wrong and I ended up..." She gestured at the apartment. "Here. Wherever here is."
"Powder," Powder returned, finally sitting up. The room tilted for a second, then stabilized. She stuck out her hand. "My name's Powder. This is New York City, this is Earth, and you are either a very detailed hallucination or the most interesting thing that has ever happened to me."
Lux looked at the outstretched hand, then took it. Her grip was warm and firm and extremely real-feeling for something that shouldn't exist. "It's nice to meet you, Powder. Under the circumstances."
"Under the circumstances," Powder agreed. She let go of Lux's hand and ran both of hers over her face, rubbing her eyes. "Okay listen. Here's where I'm at. I've been awake for far too long. I can barely see straight. I'm exhausted on a level that I think might actually be medically dangerous. And you just fell through a magical portal in my living room wearing armor and carrying a glowing stick."
"It's my staff," Lux interjected, a hint of indignation in her voice.
"Sure. My point is that my brain is not equipped to process this right now. I physically do not have the mental resources to figure out what's happening or what to do about it. So here's what I'm proposing." Powder got to her feet. "I'm going to go to bed. While I'm asleep, you can stay here. The couch is comfortable, there's blankets in the closet right there in the hallway, the bathroom is through that door, the kitchen is right there and there's food in the fridge because my sister-in-law is too fucking rich. When I wake up, if you're still here, then we'll deal with this situation. If you're not here, then I'll know I was just going crazy and I'll move on with my life. Sound like a plan?"
Lux was staring at her with an expression that mixed confusion with something that might have been admiration. "You're remarkably calm about all of this."
"I'm catatonic," Powder corrected. "Big difference. I promise you, when I wake up and I'm functioning, there will be a proper freak out."
"That's... strangely reassuring?"
"Great. Wonderful." Powder pointed at the couch, then at the kitchen, then at the hallway closet. "Couch. Food. Blankets. Help yourself to anything. Don't break anything. If someone knocks on the door, don't answer it, I don't want to explain why there's a medieval soldier in my apartment."
"I'm not-not just a soldier," Lux pouted, and there was something complicated in her voice when she said it, but Powder was too far gone to parse it.
"Goodnight, Angel."
Lux opened her mouth, probably to object to being called that, but Powder was already shuffling toward her bedroom door. She got there, put her hand on the frame, and looked back.
Lux was still kneeling on the floor where Powder had left her. The light from the windows was hitting her from behind, catching in her hair, making it glow like a halo. She was watching Powder with those blue eyes, looking lost and out of place and so startlingly beautiful in the middle of Powder's messy apartment that something in Powder's chest turned over.
Even in her state of near-death exhaustion, Powder clocked it. Then she stepped into her bedroom, closed the door, collapsed face-first onto her bed without even taking off her shoes, and was unconscious within thirty seconds.
Powder woke up to sunlight streaming through her bedroom windows, warming the left side of her face. She lay there for a moment with her eyes closed, existing in that hazy space between sleep and waking where everything was soft and unstructured and there was no past or future, just the warm comfortable present. Her body felt heavy and rested in a way it hadn't in days.
She stretched, both arms above her head, back arching, and felt several joints pop in sequence like a string of tiny firecrackers. A long, satisfied groan escaped her. She rolled over, reaching blindly for her phone.
She'd slept for approximately twenty-six hours.
"Oh, wow," she muttered, scrolling through her notification list. Texts from Ekko (twelve), Ziggs (five), Vi (three). A missed call from her academic advisor. A voicemail from Professor Heimerdinger's office about the upcoming robotics showcase. Various social media things. She ignored all of it, dropped the phone back on the nightstand, and stared at the ceiling.
She felt human again. Her thoughts were clear, her body was rested, her senses were sharp. She could think in complete sentences. She could form complex ideas. She could, in fact, remember everything that had happened before she passed out.
Everything.
Lux.
Powder sat bolt upright in bed, heart suddenly hammering. She stared at her closed bedroom door. The apartment beyond it was quiet. No sounds of movement, no voices, nothing to indicate whether or not there was another person on the other side of that door.
For a long moment, she sat there, covers bunched around her waist, trying to talk herself through this logically.
Option A: it had been a hallucination. Sleep deprivation causes hallucinations. Visual, auditory, even tactile hallucinations are well-documented side effects of extended sleeplessness. She'd been awake for two days straight, which was more than enough to trigger perceptual distortions. The whole thing, the portal, the girl, the conversation, all of it could have been her brain misfiring. She'd probably walked into her apartment, tripped over her own shoes, hit her head, and dreamed the whole encounter while passed out on the floor before crawling to bed.
Option B: a girl from another dimension had actually fallen through a portal into her apartment and was currently sleeping on her couch.
Powder tensed, took a breath, and got out of bed. She crossed to the door. Her hand hesitantly came to rest on the doorknob before turning it.
Yup, there… Lux was on the couch.
She was curled up under a navy blue throw blanket, asleep, golden hair cascading over the arm of the couch so long it almost brushed the floor. Her face was peaceful, features soft and relaxed, lips slightly parted. She'd removed the armor at some point, and it was neatly stacked on the coffee table. Beneath the armor, she wore a fitted white undershirt and dark fitted pants. The staff was leaning against the wall behind the couch, its crystal catching the afternoon sunlight and throwing tiny rainbow refractions across the ceiling.
This was real.
She was actually real.
Powder stood in her bedroom doorway, fully rested, fully coherent, fully capable of processing reality.
She screamed.
Lux's reaction was instantaneous. She shot upright on the couch like she'd been spring-loaded, blanket flying, one hand thrust out in front of her. Golden light burst from her palm, bright and sharp and very clearly not decorative, filling the room with a warm glow that cast hard shadows against every surface. Her eyes were wide and wild, scanning the apartment for a threat, body tense and ready to fight. Her gaze then locked onto Powder.
They stared at each other across the living room. Powder pressed against her bedroom doorframe with both hands clamped over her own mouth, eyes enormous. Lux on the couch with golden light radiating from her outstretched hand, hair wild, looking like something out of a fantasy painting.
Silence except for the faint hum of Lux's… magic? and Powder's harsh breathing through her fingers.
Then Lux lowered her hand and the light faded and her shoulders dropped.
"You mentioned there would be a proper freak out," Lux said, her voice rough from sleep but carrying a note of dry humor. "I suppose this is it."
Powder pulled her hands away from her mouth. "You're real," she managed, and her voice came out squeaky and high. "Oh my god, you’re actually real here on my couch and you came from a portal that opened in my living room and an actual person fell on me. Oh my god."
"Yes," Lux confirmed, sitting up properly and pulling the blanket around her shoulders. In the afternoon light, without the armor, without the combat stance, she looked softer. Still impossibly beautiful, but in a more human way. "I'm real. I'm sorry about the unannounced entrance and falling on you. Neither was intentional."
"Oh my god." Powder ran both hands through her tangled blue hair, pacing now, three steps one way, three steps back. "Oh my god. Okay. Okay okay okay. Let me think. Let me process. Give me a second."
"Take your time," Lux encouraged, watching Powder with an expression that suggested she found it somewhat amusing despite everything.
Powder continued to pace. Her brain was firing on all cylinders now. She'd already heard Lux's explanation before, already had the basic information even if she'd been too exhausted to properly engage with them then. Runeterra. Demacia. A mage. A transportation spell gone wrong.
Cross-dimensional travel.
"Okay," Powder announced, stopping abruptly and spinning to face Lux. "Okay. You're from another world called Runeterra. You're a mage, you can do magic. You were trying to travel within your own world using a spell but the spell messed up and sent you here instead. In, I’m assuming, an entirely different dimension."
"I believe so."
"And you've been here for," Powder checked her mental math, "over a full day while I was unconscious."
"I think. It's hard to tell time here. Your clocks are different from ours."
"What did you do in the meantime?"
Lux shifted on the couch, looking slightly sheepish. "I explored your home a bit. Tried to figure out how things work. Some of it is intuitive, the water from the faucet, the doors, the blankets. Some of it is completely beyond me. I couldn't figure out how to make that large black rectangle on the wall do anything." She pointed at the TV. "And the small rectangular device on your desk lit up a few times and made sounds and I wasn't sure if it was alive or not, so I left it alone."
"That's my laptop," Powder answered. "And that's a television. They're not alive. They're just computers."
"I don't know what a computer is."
Powder stared at her. Then she started laughing. She couldn't help it. The situation was so absurd, so completely and totally outside the realm of anything she'd ever expected to deal with in her life, that laughter was the only appropriate response. She laughed until her stomach hurt and she had to lean against the wall for support, and Lux watched her with a confused expression that gradually softened into something almost fond.
"I'm sorry," Powder gasped, wiping her eyes. "I'm not laughing at you. It's just... of all the apartments in all the buildings in all the cities in the world, you fell into mine. And I'm a boring college student and you're a magical warrior from some fantasy realm. It's just very funny from a cosmic perspective."
"I can see how it might be," Lux agreed, the corner of her mouth quirking up.
Powder straightened up, took a deep breath, and forced herself into focus. She was good at taking impossible situations and breaking them down into manageable pieces. Good at finding the logic in chaos. It was why she was an engineer, why she loved the precision of machines and systems and problem-solving. Give her a problem and she'd take it apart until she found the answer.
"Okay," she started, moving into the living room properly and sitting down in the armchair across from the couch, pulling her legs up underneath her. "First question: can you get back? Can you recreate the spell, or portal, or whatever it was that brought you here?"
Lux's expression sobered immediately. The lightness left her face, replaced by something tight and worried. "I've tried, several times while you were asleep. My magic still works here." She held up her hand and golden light gathered in her palm, gentle and warm, illuminating her face from below. "I can still create light, still shape it, still use it. But when I try to open a portal, try to reach across to my world..." She closed her hand and the light vanished. "Nothing. It's like pushing against something solid. I can feel the barrier between our worlds but I can't get through it."
"So your magic works for regular magic stuff but not for the interdimensional travel part."
"Essentially, yes. The transportation spell I used was already advanced magic, something I was only barely able to accomplish within my own world. I think what happened was that the spell destabilized at a critical point, and instead of moving me within Runeterra, it tore through the barrier between dimensions. But it seems like that was a one-time break. The barrier has sealed back up and I can't get through it again."
Powder's mind was already racing ahead, fitting pieces together. "That makes sense from a physics perspective, actually. If you think of the dimensional barrier like a membrane, your spell was designed to move along the surface of it, travel within your own plane. But some variable went wrong, maybe external interference, maybe an error in the casting, and instead of sliding along the surface, the spell punched through it. Punching a hole is a fundamentally different action than sliding along a surface. The hole might have sealed itself after you came through, like how skin heals after a puncture wound."
Lux was staring at her. "You're remarkably quick to accept this."
"Honestly? I've read weird things in quantum mechanics textbooks. At least your situation has a visible, demonstrable component." Powder gestured at Lux's hand, where the golden light had been a moment ago. "You have literal impossible magic. That's pretty convincing evidence that the world is more complicated than standard physics accounts for. I'm not going to sit here and deny what I can see with my own eyes."
"Most people would, I think."
"I'm not most people." Powder grinned, quick and bright. "I'm Powder. Nice to properly meet you, Lux from Runeterra."
Lux returned the smile, small and genuine. "Nice to properly meet you too, Powder from... New York City, was it?"
"New York City, Earth, Milky Way Galaxy, the Universe, et cetera."
"Ah."
"It's a big place. Or, well, it's a small place compared to the scale of things, but lots of people live here." Powder unfolded her legs and leaned forward, elbows on knees. "Okay. Second question: is there urgency? Like, do you need to get back immediately? Is there a time constraint?"
The shift in Lux was immediate again. Her spine straightened and her jaw set and something in her eyes went hard and distant. "Yes. A great deal of urgency."
"Explain."
Lux was quiet for a moment, gathering her thoughts. When she spoke, her voice was controlled and precise. "In Demacia, magic is feared and hated. For generations, anyone found to have magical abilities has been imprisoned, or worse. There's an organization called the Mageseekers whose entire purpose is to hunt down and contain people like me." She held up her hand again, let a soft glow pulse in her palm. "For a long time, I hid what I was. I'm from a noble family, one of the most prominent in the kingdom, and if anyone found out I was a mage, everything my family had would be destroyed."
"But, well, you're not hiding anymore," Powder stated. It wasn't a question.
"Not anymore. A few months ago, the situation in Demacia reached a breaking point. It's become a civil war, essentially. The crown and the Mageseekers on one side, the mages and their allies on the other. And I..." Lux took a breath. "I'm leading the mages. Or helping to lead them. They need someone with influence, with connections, with power both magical and political. I revealed myself as a mage publicly, gave up my family name and my status, and joined the resistance. It's been working. We've been making progress. But it's precarious, the fight is far from over, and my people are depending on me."
She met Powder's eyes, and there was a fierce determination there that Powder recognized, that she understood on a bone-deep level even though her own struggles had never been this severe.
"I need to get back," Lux asserted. "I don't know what's happened since I disappeared. If the Mageseekers have advanced, if my allies think I've been captured or killed, if the people I'm supposed to protect are in danger because I'm not there to help them. Every day I'm here is a day they're without me, and I can't..." Her voice got tight. "I can't abandon them."
"Hey," Powder spoke, and her voice came out gentle without her meaning it to. "We're going to figure this out. I don't know how yet, but that's literally my whole thing."
"You barely know me," Lux sighed. "Why would you help me?"
"Because you need help," Powder shrugged simply. "And because you're stuck in my apartment in a world you don't understand with no way home yet. What kind of person would I be if I just went back to class?"
Lux looked at her for a long moment, searching Powder's face for something. Whatever she found there seemed to satisfy her, because some of the tension left her shoulders. "Thank you, Powder."
"Don't thank me yet." Powder stood up, stretched, cracked her knuckles. "But okay. You're stuck here, you need to get back, your magic can't break through the barrier. What we need to figure out is how to reopen that connection between our worlds. And for that, I need more information about the spell you were casting, about the conditions when it went wrong, about anything unusual that was happening at the time."
"I can tell you everything I remember."
"Good. But first..." Powder looked at Lux's outfit, the white undershirt and the strange dark pants, the armor stacked on the coffee table. Then she looked at the windows, at the city visible beyond them. "First, we need to deal with the fact that you cannot walk around New York City looking like that."
Lux looked down at herself. "What's wrong with how I look?"
"Nothing! I mean, y’know, this isn’t most people’s everyday attire. People will stare and ask questions we probably don't want to answer."
"I see." Lux considered this.
Powder was already thinking about logistics. "I've got some stuff you could borrow for now, but you're a little taller than me and our body types are different, so it won't be a perfect fit. Tomorrow, when I've got time, I'll take you shopping."
"Shopping," Lux repeated, like the word was foreign.
"Shopping. You know, going to stores, trying on clothes, buying things."
"I know what shopping is," Lux said, with a hint of offense. "We have shops in Demacia."
"Right, sorry. I just wasn't sure how much overlap there was." Powder was already heading to her bedroom, pulling open her closet. She grabbed a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt, both clean (miracle of miracles), and brought them back out to Lux. "Here. Tomorrow we'll get you proper stuff."
Lux took the offered clothes, holding them up to examine them. The t-shirt was black with a small printed design of a robot that Powder had gotten at a tech convention last year. The sweatpants were grey and well-worn. Lux looked at them like they were artifacts from an alien civilization, which, Powder supposed, they sort of were from her perspective.
"The bathroom is right through there," Powder pointed. "Take your time. I'm going to make food because I haven't eaten in approximately forever and you probably haven't either."
Lux nodded and headed for the bathroom, pausing at the door to examine the knob for a moment before figuring out how it worked and disappearing inside. Powder heard a small "oh" of surprise a moment later, probably at the shower or the toilet or the sink or any number of things that were apparently not standard features in magical medieval kingdoms.
While Lux was in the bathroom, Powder went to the kitchen. Caitlyn had indeed stocked the fridge, as promised, and as always, she'd gone overboard. Fresh vegetables, fruits, eggs, bread, cheese, and several containers of what looked like pre-made meals from the expensive deli on the Upper East Side that Caitlyn frequented. God bless Caitlyn Kiramman and her deeply ingrained need to help.
Powder pulled out eggs and bread and butter and set about making the simplest possible meal: scrambled eggs and toast. She was a decent cook when she put her mind to it, but right now her mind was occupied with approximately seven thousand other things, so simplicity was key.
As she cracked eggs into a bowl, she let her brain work on the problem in the background.
Cross-dimensional travel. Barrier between worlds. Magic that could break through under certain conditions but not others. What had been different about the first time? What variable had changed to allow the breakthrough? Was it something about the spell itself, something about the conditions on Lux's side, something about this side? Was there something about this specific location, this specific point in space-time, that made the barrier thinner?
She whisked the eggs aggressively, thinking.
The bathroom door opened and Lux emerged, and Powder's train of thought derailed completely.
Lux in Powder's casual clothes was a sight. The black t-shirt was a bit too short, showing a strip of stomach above the waistband of the sweatpants, which were slightly too short on her legs, exposing her ankles. Her golden hair was loose and flowing past her shoulders, slightly damp from what Powder assumed was a brief encounter with the bathroom sink. Without the armor, without the wear underneath, she looked like she belonged here. Still unreasonably beautiful, but in a more casual way.
"These are very comfortable," Lux commented, looking down at herself. "The fabric is so soft."
"That's cotton and polyester for you," Powder said, dragging her eyes back to the eggs she was supposed to be scrambling. "Very different from armor, I imagine."
"Very different from everything I usually wear, yes." Lux crossed into the living room area, moving toward the windows. She stopped in front of them, looking out at the city below. The sun was casting long shadows between the buildings, and the lights were starting to come on in windows across the skyline.
"This place," Lux said quietly. "It's enormous."
"Yeah." Powder glanced over from the kitchen. "About eight and a half million people in this particular city. About three hundred and fifty million in this particular country. About eight billion on the whole planet."
Lux turned to look at her, eyebrows raised. "Eight billion people?"
"Give or take."
"Demacia has perhaps two million in the entire kingdom."
"Well, we've got you beat on population, at least." Powder turned back to the stove, pushing the eggs around the pan. "How's your world handle feeding two million people? Agriculture? Magic?"
"Agriculture, mostly. Some magical enhancement of crops in the regions where mages are allowed to practice openly. Which is... not many regions, currently." There was a bitterness in her voice at that last part.
The toast popped up. Powder plated everything, two servings, and carried them to the small dining table near the kitchen. "Come eat."
Lux came over, examining the plate of eggs and toast with curiosity before sitting down. She picked up the fork (at least forks seemed to be universal, Powder noted) and took a bite. Her eyes went a little wide.
"This is amazing."
"It's scrambled eggs."
"We have eggs in Demacia, but they don't taste like this. What did you put in them?"
"Butter, salt, a little bit of cheese at the end." Powder sat down across from her with her own plate. "Nothing fancy."
They ate in a companionable silence that surprised Powder with its ease. There should have been tension, awkwardness, a million unresolved questions hanging in the air. And there were unresolved questions, plenty of them, but the actual act of sitting across from Lux and eating scrambled eggs felt strangely natural.
After they finished eating and Powder had washed the dishes (Lux offered to help, was fascinated by the concept of dish soap and running hot water from a tap), they settled back in the living room. Powder back in the armchair, Lux on the couch, facing each other.
"All right," Powder clasped her hands. "Let's talk more. Walk me through the spell you were casting when everything went wrong. Start from the beginning, don't leave anything out, even stuff you think isn't relevant."
Lux nodded, pulling her feet up onto the couch and tucking them under herself. She looked small and human like that, wrapped in Powder's borrowed sweatpants, and Powder had to remind herself that this was a mage and resistance leader from another world, not a lost college student.
"I was in the Mageseekers' compound," Lux began. "We'd just liberated it. It was a significant victory, but we needed to consolidate quickly. I had allies in the eastern provinces who needed to know that the compound had fallen, and needed to coordinate with us for the next phase of the campaign. The fastest way to reach them was a transportation spell."
"You've done this spell before?"
"Yes, many times. It's advanced magic, but I've been practicing it for over a year. I've never had a problem with it before." Lux frowned, clearly replaying the memory. "I set the anchor point in my mind, visualized the destination, channeled the energy. Everything felt normal at first. But then..." She paused, thinking. "There was interference. I felt it. Like something pushing against the spell from the outside, disrupting the flow of energy."
"Interference from what?"
"I'm not sure. The Mageseekers' compound was full of anti-magic devices, dampeners and containers and things designed to suppress magical energy. We'd deactivated most of them, but perhaps not all. If one of them was still partially active, it could have disrupted the spell just enough to redirect it."
Powder was leaning forward, elbows on knees. "So you were casting in an environment with potential magical interference. The interference hit the spell while you were in the middle of casting, and instead of moving you to where you intended to go, it ripped a hole in reality and sent you here."
"That's my best guess, yes."
"Okay. That's actually really helpful." Powder's mind was working, making connections, building a framework. "It means the cross-dimensional travel wasn't intentional or a feature of the spell, it was a malfunction caused by specific environmental conditions. Which means to recreate it, to open a portal back, we'd potentially need to recreate those conditions. Or find another way to apply that same kind of disruptive force to a portal spell."
"The problem is I don't have access to Mageseeker technology here," Lux pointed out. "And I don't know exactly which device caused the interference or how it interacted with my magic."
"No, but we know it's possible. We know the barrier between our worlds can be breached. That's something. There’s a solution somewhere, we just have to find it." Powder sat back, running a hand through her messy blue hair. "I won't pretend to understand how this magic works. That's way outside my expertise. But if it's interacting with physical forces, with energy, with dimensional barriers that have some kind of structure, then there might be a scientific angle to this. A way to approach this that combines your magical knowledge with my physics and engineering knowledge."
"You think your science and magic might overlap?"
"I think everything overlaps if you look at it the right way," Powder answered. "Your magic manipulates energy, clearly. So does physics. Your portal moves matter through space. So does engineering. Maybe the language is different, the methods are different, but the underlying principles might have common ground."
Lux was looking at her with an expression of genuine fascination. "You're very smart, aren't you?"
Powder flushed, which was annoying. She didn't flush. She was generally immune to compliments but something about the way Lux said it, straightforward and sincere, caught her off guard.
"I'm good with problems," she deflected.
"I don't think that’s any different, actually."
"Well, agree to disagree." Powder cleared her throat. "Point is, we'll figure this out. It might take some time, I'm not going to lie about that. But I'll work on it. In the meantime, you need a place to stay, and you've already got the couch, so you might as well keep it."
"I can't impose on you like that. You're clearly young, you have your own life, your own responsibilities..."
"Lux." Powder said her name with a firmness that surprised both of them. "You don't know anyone else in this world. You don't know how anything works here. You don't have money, you don't have identification, you don't have a phone or clothes or anything. Where exactly would you go?"
Lux's mouth opened, then closed. She didn't have an argument for that.
"You're staying here," Powder argued. "End of discussion. It's a nice couch. Cait spent more money on it than most people spend in a month. You'll be comfortable."
For a moment, Lux looked like she might argue more. Then her shoulders relaxed, and a small, grateful smile crossed her face. "Thank you, Powder. Truly. I don't know what I would have done if I'd landed somewhere else."
"You'd have figured it out," Powder said. "You seem like the type who figures things out."
"We have that in common, then."
Powder grinned. "I guess we do."
They stayed up talking for a while longer. Powder asked more questions about Runeterra, about Demacia, about magic, filing away every piece of information as potentially relevant to solving the problem of getting Lux home. Lux asked questions about Earth, about New York, about technology, about Powder's life. It was easy, surprisingly easy. Lux was sharp and curious and asked questions that showed real intelligence. Powder was used to being the talkative one in any conversation, the one who rambled and jumped between topics and had to be reined in. But with Lux, the conversation flowed naturally between them, trading observations and explanations back and forth.
Around midnight, Powder finally noticed Lux stifling yawns and insisted they both get some sleep. She set Lux up on the couch with the blanket and an extra pillow, showed her how to turn off the lamp (which required a brief lesson in how light switches worked, which was funny given Lux could literally create light from nothing), and retreated to her bedroom.
She lay in bed for a long time, staring at the ceiling, mind racing too fast for sleep. There was a girl from another world sleeping on her couch. A magical, beautiful, kind, fascinating girl from another world who needed Powder's help. And Powder, who'd been coasting through her sophomore year with amazing grades and good friends and a good life that sometimes felt just a tiny bit too easy, too comfortable, too predictable...
Powder had a real, meaningful project now.
She fell asleep smiling.