She was directed to follow the two reptilian centaurs. The three walked silently from the dusty dirt of the Barren and onto the lighter grey pavement of civilisation. After a few minutes they entered a modern (to her, at least) five story office building, arriving in an open space resembling a hotel reception hall.

"Ah, you are the rifter Kralok was sent to bring." A high pitched voice commented from the reception desk. "I'll call your case worker, she'll be here soon."

The receptionist was almost human looking, save for having hot pink skin and a disproportionately large head. They pressed a few of the buttons protruding from their desk, and leaned back on their chair, their job seemingly done.

At this point, her escorts left the building, so the dryad was resigned to waiting another couple of minutes while standing in front of the receptionist in awkward silence.

Eventually, her case worker arrived. They - she, from what the receptionist said - was the most alien person the dryad had come across so far. Her body was a large orb of white metal, her limbs dozens of flexible cables sticking out from small slits on the orb that constantly opened and closed, propelling the mechanical creature by a mix of pushing, walking, and rolling on the ground. While the movements seemed chaotic and haphazard, there was a certain rhythm to them that brought to mind a team of synchronised dancers.

"Hello! My name is Rusty! I've been assigned as your case worker for your integration into Citadel."

Rusty's voice was distinctly artificial, like a synthesizer, with crackles like radio noise sprinkled on top. Nonetheless, it was still recognisibly feminine.

"Come with me, we'll take care of the papers in my office."

They walked through a short corridor, before one of Rusty's many cable tendrils pressed against a handle-less door, which opened upwards in response.

The dryad followed in with some trepidation. Now that the novelty of receiving stimuli again had worn off, she realized how lost she felt. A new world which she knew next to nothing about, with no people she could call friends... She felt anxious.

Especially as she just now realised she had been naked all this time. Then again, her "escort detail" wore nothing below their upper torsos, despite the fact they did have organs to hide there, so perhaps nudity wasn't anything remarkable here.

"You may sit on the chair or lay down on any of the other seats." Rusty gestured around the office, where a regular armchair stood, among backless sofas and pillows and other furniture she couldn't quite recognise, the most perplexing of which was a tall latticed fence.

She sank her wooden bottom into the cushioned armchair. Rusty nestled herself into a circle shaped hole in the ceiling, her limbs holding up a mundane looking pen and a clipboard.

"Now, I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions relating to how you arrived in the Barren. First, though, what name and pronouns should I use to refer to you?"

The dryads eyes widened in a sudden realisation. "I don't... I don't remember my name!"

"Don't worry, that's okay. This just means you can now choose one!" Rusty responded cheerfully.

"I suppose. But, what should I choose?" She scratched her head.

"Well, usually, nameless rifters choose a name that references their homeworld culture, or one that represents an ideal they strive for. I chose Rusty, because my chassis was thoroughly rusted through before I arrived here. The scout that found me helped me restore myself. I never wanted to forget their kindness. We later became partners for fifteen years. But that's enough about me!" Rusty stopped her rambling with a nervous laughter.

The dryad thought about what direction she should go here. She was a tree person now, so she thought it fitting to name herself after a tree.

"Oak" was the first one that came to mind. Her bark looked remarkably like that of an oak tree, and it was sort of the "default" tree in her mind. But that name felt... taken. She was pretty sure she knew someone on Earth who already had that name.

She briefly went over all the different types of trees she knew. Pine and Elm felt off for no particular reason. Ash was out due to the fiery implications. Eaucalyptus was a mouthful... but it reminded her of another tree that grew in the same environment. One that wa sussed for food, wood, and some varieties were even toxic. A many-faceted, yet for some reason often overlooked tree. What's more, the name of the tree had a nice ring to it.

"My name is going to be... Acacia." The dryad finally decided. "Oh, and I use she/her pronouns."

Rusty's cables whipped into a frenzy, writing the information down.

"Wonderful! So, you didn't remember your name, I'm assuming there are other memory problems?"

"Yes, I can't remember many details of my previous life. My planet was called Earth, I had friends whose names and faces escape me, my family was alive, but I didn't have a great relationship with them... there is lots of things that feel a certain way, but I can't tell why." Acacia laid out.

"I see..." Rusty hummed as she kept writing. "I have a theory. What is your earliest memory from when you were already in the Barren?"

"Uhh... darkness. I was stuck, and constricted, and I thought I was buried alive, and I struggled to escape, and when I finally did, it turned out I was stuck in a dead tree, and now I'm also a tree."

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Rusty's pen stopped for a moment.

"So you weren't the same species in your homeworld?"

"No, I was what we called 'human'. I had the same silhouette as I do now, but I was made out of meat and not wood."

Rusty flipped some switch to the other in her "chair" and a console popped out from the ceiling. She tapped at it furiously with her cables for a good minute.

"You seem to have experienced a soul rend." She finally concluded.

"That doesn't sound very good." Acacia stated the obvious.

"Usually, the rifts that transport matter into the Barren are either big enough to swallow objects up to the size of this room, or small enough that nothing but a few particles of air make their way through. Either way, they cannot split objects apart due to complex magical reasons I'm not qualified to explain. That's usually, though. Some rifts are unstable, and collapse in the middle of transferring something. As you might imagine, whatever was stuck midway gets horribly mangled as a result."

"So I was halfway through a rift, and then it collapsed?"

"Oh, no, in that case, you'd be in your original body, and you would quickly die due to suddenly missing a large chunk of it. Another detail about rifts is that they don't appear just in the physical world."

"Wait, let me try to guess. You called it a 'soul rend'. So I'm guessing this means souls are real, and a rift appeared on whatever layer of reality they exist on, and I was unfortunate enough that mine fell partway through as the rift was collapsing."

"Precisely!"

"Why are you so cheerful about that?!"

"Well you survived, didn't you? And, although you have no knowledge of souls or other magical sciences, you have a good intuition for it, which will be very useful to you in your new life!"

Acacia raised a finger, but lowered it after a second. "I suppose. But how is that scenario any different than getting bisected by a closing rift normally? How am I alive?"

"A soul is a vessel constructed by the mind, to contain and protect the mind. And do magic, but you'll learn more about that later. Point is, its main purpose is to ensure your mind has space to grow and to keep it safe. Your soul got ripped away from your body, which damaged your mind, but didn't kill it. Once the soul landed on this side, however damaged, it was still intact enough to instinctively anchor itself back to a body. The body it landed in wasn't very compatible, from what you said, so you magically altered the new body until outright rejection wasn't an issue. The system handled the rest. Your default Presence was below ten, correct?"

"Uh, yes. But-"

"It is most likely due to the strain of keeping your body from rejecting your soul. I reccomend increasing your Presence in the future."

"But how did I do magic? I didn't even know magic was real until I looked at the system, after I crawled out of the tree!"

"It is very impressive, indeed. The fact that you survived this shows an incredible aptitude for magic. Though, again, I suggest you raise your Presence before you try learning any spells not given by the system. It might genuinely cause you to die, and it won't be a painless death."

"Im just going to think out loud for a second. My soul got ripped out of my body, and I managed to anchor myself to a nearby tree and mold it into a humanoid shape. Just off of pure talent. I can bend reality to my whim, and I don't even have to think about it."

"Well, no. You have an enor.pus magical potential, but reality bending is something altogether different."

"How is magic not bending reality?"

"Reality bending is- ah, here I go, getting distracted again. I'm just supposed to gather your background information right now. I'll give you a proper introduction later, I promise."

Acacia sighed. "Alright, i know bureaucracy when I see it. But I will pick your shiny orb-head-thing for this as soon as we're done with this."

"That was incredibly insensitive." Rusty responded, her voice suddenly serious.

"Really? Shit, I'm sorry, I don't-"

Rusty generated a sound between chortling and grinding of metal. "I'm just kidding!" She laughed with her previous enthusiasm. "Sorry, I like to joke around a bit. Anyway. You said your honeworld had no magical development?"

Acacia blinked. She then shrugged. At least it's not boring anymore.

"Magic was never confirmed to be anything beyond a superstition. Gods either didn't exist or didn't influence the world, which as far as I'm concerned means the same thing."

"I'm guessing your society developed using mundane, physics-compliant technology, then?"

"Yes. Industrial machinery, electronics with high computational power... I'd like to think we also understood the rules of physics pretty well, too. Not myself, I didn't even pass college, but scientists were studying the smallest particles comprising reality, even using their properties for research. And warfare. If there's one thing our species did well, it was killing each other."

Rusty was diligently noting. "You said 'your species'... what about others? Or was yourself the only sapient species?"

"It was only us humans, though some animals came close to what I'd consider sapience. We never left our home star system, so there was a chance there was someone else out there we just never came across... I guess I'll never learn that, though."

"Oh? Your species was capable of leaving your home planet? Without magic?"

"Yeah, though it took a lot of calculations, careful engineering, and expensive materials. We had humans walk on the surface of our moon, but anywhere further than that we only sent unmanned vehicles to analyse samples."

"To figure out where to best settle?" Rusty guessed.

"Uhh... kind of. I'm pretty sure we could figure out if a planet was habitable just by analysing how light bounced off of it, with the samples being a mor in-depth confirmation, but frankly, we just did that to know."

"To know?"

"Yeah, just... to learn. I think that's out best quality. Curiosity. We literally named one of the space rovers 'Curiosity.' Not to say animals weren't curious, but we could actually look more in depth at the world. Every bad instinct we had, the prejudices, fear... curiosity is an antidote for that. You hate and fear what you don't know. Maybe if we learned everything, we would never have to fear anymore."

Acacia sat in silence after that for a while.

"Sorry." She eventually said. "I think about this a lot. Even without you prompting me, I'd spend a lot of time thinking about humans. If, on the whole, we are good or bad. If we ought to self destruct. I don't remember the specifics, but I wasn't... healthy. Mentally, I mean. Humans did some truly awful stuff to eachother. But we're getting better, I think. I hope so, at least. Not really something I'll see or participate in anymore. Well, now the question is, how are people here. Do you have any more questions, or can we get to the explanation part?"

Rusty quickly went through her notes, typing again into the console.

"Okay, your file is done, we can now go to your new house and you can ask me anything you want on the way. Do keep in mind I'm just a clerk and not a scholar of magic nor technology. I only know about them what everyone here ought to know."

Rusty disentagled herself from her seat on the ceiling, and Acacia stood up from her chair to follow her.

"Okay, so what was that about magic and reality bending being different?"