They all just seemed so nice, Laurence didn’t mind that they were all talking at once and overflowing his buffers. Probably this was because of the magic thing, and he ought to freak out. But he was too tired to make himself worry about things that didn’t already worry him on their own. Laurence was nervous that he smelled like bacon-wrapped sausage fumes.

The bookstore had no musty “old books” smell, and instead it had a nice oaky aroma, similar to the way Laurence imagined the whiskey casks would be before you put Scotch into them for aging. This was a place where you would age well.

There was some debate over whether they would go out for dinner—everybody except Ernesto, that is—or just bring in food. “Maybe we could check out that new hipster tapas place,” suggested Patricia.

“Tapas!” Dorothea, the elderly lady, clapped her hands, so her bracelets rang.

The person of unknown gender, whose name rather unhelpfully was Taylor, said perhaps Laurence would be more comfortable on neutral ground.

“Yes, yes, you must go,” Ernesto said in his gravelly voice with a hint of a Latin accent. “Go! Do not worry about me at all.” In the end, Ernesto insisted so loudly that they simply must leave him behind, everybody wound up offering to stay in with him.

Laurence couldn’t help wondering if he’d just witnessed a wizard duel.

Somehow, they managed to catch the Korean taco truck driving from one location to another, and bought a dozen spicy bulgogi and barbecue tofu tacos while it was stopped at a red light. Laurence’s taco had a lot of cilantro and onions, the way he secretly liked it. His anxiety melted away, and he envied Patricia for having such charming friends. If this had been a gathering of Laurence’s tribe, by now someone would already have tried to prove they were the supreme expert on some topic. There would have been dick-measuring. Instead, these people just seemed to accept one another and feed each other tacos.

They all got seats on folding chairs or the handful of actual armchairs in the bookstore. Laurence wound up sitting between Taylor, the young person of indeterminate gender, and Dorothea, the lady of indeterminate age.

Dorothea smiled and leaned over as Laurence chewed his taco. “I once owned a restaurant that had doorways in a dozen cities around the world,” she whispered. “Each entrance wore a different menu, advertising a different cuisine, but we had no kitchen. Just tables, tablecloths, and chairs. We carried the dishes back and forth, between the cities in different lands. So were we a restaurant, or a conduit?” Laurence wasn’t sure if she was telling a real story or just taking the piss, or both. He stared, and all at once her face was full of laugh lines.