Alicorn Sandbox

Labor rental outfit. Could be a disaster if it's for fetching and carrying, could be all right if she's hired out for writing, could be mediocre if it's for caring for people's invalid maiden aunts, could be intolerable if it's code for "whorehouse" - and there are more girls than boys in the batch she's currently shackled in a wagon with. Aya's debating whether to start a conversation with the slave next to her to see if she knows more when -

An embroidered bear that looks like it's wearing a suit of lace-bordered plate armor and has tiny useless metal wings to match and is at least four times its likely original size charges the horses, who startle madly and go completely out of control.

The wagon goes over. There's a fence, at the side of the road, there's posted warning signs, beware Magic in this ravine until post marking its end, but the wagon with all the slaves in it crashes right through the fence. Gravity's upended, everyone's screaming, some of the screams cut off abruptly as they tumble end over end down the slope. Aya flings manacled hands over the back of her head, feels a familiar snap in her arm as something strikes it - that's broken; and now her nose is too - there's a splinter of wood through her calf and her ear's ringing and wet with blood and she's got to have cracked a rib -

She's completely unharmed, unperforated, not even embroidered as far as she can tell. The steel around her wrists and ankles is gone. She doesn't see any of the other slaves - no, on second though, maybe she does, there's a bright orange snake with a tail that splits into five fish-finned ropes and a beetle the size of her head with the lyrics of Midnight Lightning written across its wing casings in block letters and a surprised-looking rabbit with wheels for forefeet and a broom-end for a tail. Everyone else is either much less recognizable or vanished entirely. But she's fine.

(She checks her heel. It's still marked. So she's unrestrained and unsupervised, but not, technically speaking, free.)

She needs to get out of the magic soonish, before it gets bored with its minimal alterations of her person, decides she'd be prettier as a glass music box decorated with butterfly wings, or a leather-upholstered down pillow that drinks blood, or a goose with windmill blades spinning around its neck. She's not, however, sure that she can climb the hill. It's likely she'd get just far out enough to count as having exited the magic and then fall, taking her chances a second time, and while this occasion she was lucky, nobody else was - she doesn't think she's been lied to all her life about the general safety of the environment. She'll have to go out the other way. She wades into the waist-high grass, routing around the clump made of swords and the clump made of swaying violin strings and the patch that might just be pitch-black flora but might be something else - but most of the grass seems only to be grass; plants tend to be safer in magics than animals. She winds up startling a dozing bird-eel-cat hybrid so thoroughly mixed up that she has no best guess as to what it was originally. It flap-flop-flees.

And then, when she hasn't seen an embroidered plant for a while since the shrub that appeared to be growing assorted national flags for leaves and onions by way of fruit, and thinks she might be close to the edge, there's a door.

It is freestanding in its frame, painted bright and glossy red with a few words in other colors on it running in various directions ("entirely", "yellow", "jump", "choristers", and "melting"), has pink fringe growing out of its hinges, and has where a handle might normally be, a slender open jar affixed with its mouth pointing up which is full of small-denomination coins, dried cloves, and what looks like it might be olive oil.

Aya has no idea how big this magic is. She doesn't know if drinking the water or eating anything vaguely appetizing that she finds around it will be taken as a second invitation to turn her blue or centipedal or dead. She could turn back and try to climb out the way she came, but - then what?

She's nowhere near the border.

Her legal owner is the employer of the fellow who was driving her and the others to the labor rental office.

The magic hasn't given her a set of papers and it has not unmarked her heel, and provoking it is more likely to make things worse than better.

And she's never heard of a door in a magic before.

She gingerly touches the jar, which is cool under her hand - and she pulls - and the door opens, tufts of pink in the hinges squeaking, to reveal what looks like a bar, which definitely isn't behind it if she peers around the frame.

Aya takes a deep breath and she walks in.