The boy at the bookstore never returned. Kaelen made a point to go back and ask during his three days of figuring out how to help his friends. Turns out, the kid - Rodrigo - was only working there for the summer, and he was just picking up a few shifts before his contract fully ended. Kaelen knew better than to ask for a random teenager's address, so he left it at that.

Kaelen instead pivoted to looking up more reference books. He didn't buy any of the books on pseudoscience, instead choosing to focus on art history and analysis. Again, he could look them up, but he had the sneaking suspicion that if he did that, he'd find less, not more.

He did, however, pick up a book on hypnosis. He figured if he needed to get into a lucid dream state, it was as good an attempt as any. So, The Oxford Handbook of Hypnosis was a decent first try, he figured.

He read through the art history books first. Histories of Dutch paintings, instructional books on botanical drawings and scientific illustration, and books on the language of flowers. He must have looked crazy, carrying those books through the mall and to the courtyard, but he didn't particularly care at this point.

Kaelen was aware that libraries existed. He knew it would be cheaper to just...do that. But there was something about the books being his. He didn't do drugs, didn't drink alcohol, didn't gamble on gacha games - he didn't even really go to concerts, unless his friends wanted to. His only vice, really, was books. He loved having real, physical books in his hands, knowing that the knowledge contained within wasn't just being carried from server to server.

This knowledge was his.

The mid-September air had begun to cool, so Kaelen was glad for his hoodie. He sat in the sun and opened the books, sipping his coffee-cube latte.

One of the books - The Language of Flowers - was from 1884. He knew he had to pick it up as soon as he saw it because of its age (and price relative to its age, being less than 10 dollars), and sure enough, Strawberry Tree was listed in its pages. According to this book, the symbolism of the strawberry tree was "Esteem and love." This went against Rain's interpretation of the symbolism as temptation, but that didn't mean she was wrong.

"Whatcha reading?" a small voice asked.

Kaelen looked up. Standing in front of him was a child who couldn't have been more than eight years old. He was a black child with a slight frame, with eyes like warm coffee. He was eagerly looking at Kaelen's book, as though it held all of life's answers.

"Oh...it's a book on flowers," Kaelen said.

"Cool! What about the flowers?" the child asked.

Kaelen thought for a second about how to explain. "A long, long time ago, people used to use flowers to talk to each other. I want to know how they did that."

The boy looked like Kaelen had just cured every malady on earth. "WHOA!!!!!" he exclaimed. "THAT'S SO COOL!!!!"

Kaelen nodded quietly and returned to his book, hoping desperately that the kid would tire of him now and he could go back to research. Unsurprisingly, the kid did not.

"I have a sister with a flower name!"

"That's nice."

"What does her name mean???"

Kaelen looked up at the boy, who was so full of joy that to ignore him would go against the Geneva Conventions. "...well, what is her name?"

"Rosemary! We call her Rosie, though!" The boy giggled.

Kaelen flipped to the section of the book that had roses and rosemary. "Well...Rosemary means remembrance."

The boy nodded reverently. "Is that like when you remember something?"

"Exactly." Kaelen didn't tell him that "remembrance" usually meant remembering the dead. "But roses, like 'Rosie', have lots of different meanings."

"Like what?"

"Well...some mean beauty. Some mean love. Some mean being together. It depends on the color."

The boy nodded in earnest. "Thank you, Mister! I'm going to tell my mom!" He ran off, waving goodbye. Kaelen breathed a sigh of relief as the boy left, but somehow felt...more weightless than before.

Kaelen took a second to look at the list of roses and their meaning. Their meanings were varied: shame, aspiration, danger, newness, simplicity, charm, and ironically, variety. He wondered what roses would look like in the hellscape he kept visiting. Would they be white, indicating transience and worthiness? Would they just symbolize wintertime, like the tiny hydrangea-like guelder roses? Or would they indicate peril, as the Carolina rose?

A thought crossed Kaelen's mind, and he texted Rain.

**Kaelen: Why would artistic interpretation matter at all?
Rain: What do you mean?
Kaelen: Sure, analyzing dreams like art seems like the way to navigate the dreamscape. But why would it BE like that?
Kaelen: Why would it make itself navigable through artistic interpretation?
Kaelen: When I was in there, it didn't FEEL like it was directly communicating anything, it just felt like it WAS.

Rain didn't answer at first, so Kaelen went back to his book, shifting his focus. Now, he needed to know how to summon, or indicate he was going somewhere. Maybe using the symbolism he knew the world was trying to work towards, coupled with hypnosis, could anchor him enough to visit the dreamscape.

Finally, he settled on enough that he was able to write a few in his notes app.

Come down . . . . . . . Jacob's Ladder.
Curiosity . . . . . . . Sycamore.
Danger . . . . . . . Rhododendron. Rosebay.
Protection . . . . . . . Bearded Crepis.
Reverie . . . . . . . Flowering Fern.
Spell . . . . . . . . Circæa.
Winter . . . . . . . . Guelder Rose.

Kaelen looked at his list and then decided on two more.

Expected meeting . . . . . . Nutmeg Geranium.
Rendezvous . . . . . . . Chickweed.

Kaelen wanted to meet somebody. Maybe it was Lysander. Maybe it was Jude. Maybe it was Briar. Maybe it was somebody else, a denizen who came from the space.

Rain texted him back, finally.

Rain: I'll be honest, I got nothing.
Kaelen: That's fine. I think I'm going to have to go in and figure it out for myself.

Suddenly, Kaelen felt a tap on his shoulder. He whirled around to see the little boy standing behind him, holding a tiny bag of gummy candies.

"Thank you for teaching me something new!" the boy said, smiling warmly. "My mom says always thank people who teach you something new. But you taught me a lot of new things, so I wanted to give you a gift!"

Kaelen blinked. ...what? "Oh...thank you..." he said quietly. "Um...do your parents know you're giving me gifts?"

"They do! They're over there! Mama says the safest men are the scariest looking ones!"

Was that...a compliment?

Kaelen looked over to where a middle-aged couple was sitting with a slightly older boy and an infant baby in pink, presumably the sister this boy was referring to. What was surprising to Kaelen was that the parents were both black, like this little boy, but the baby and older child were white, with the baby having blonde hair.

"Those are your siblings, too?"

"Yep!" the boy said, grinning. "That's Sorrel and Rosemary! And I'm Heath!" The boy, Heath, smiled.

Kaelen nodded, taking the gummies from the boy's hand. "Thank you. I'm Kaelen," Kaelen said softly.

"What does Kaelen mean?" Heath asked, with his wide, curious eyes.

"Oh...it's not in the book. Kaelen isn't a flower."

Heath nodded, seemingly determined. "I'm gonna find a Kaelen flower, and I'm gonna show you!" The boy declared. He ran back to his parents, who welcomed him with open arms.

Kaelen watched the family for a few moments. The older boy - Sorrel - was tending to his infant sister, but turned his attention to Heath and smiled. He seemed to be telling Heath something funny Rosemary had done while he was gone, because Heath loudly said, "Do it again!" to the baby. The dad walked up to the boys and planted a kiss on both of their heads, before picking up the boys, one in each arm, so that their mother could feed them.

Distantly, Kaelen wondered if Sorrel and Rosemary were adopted. It seemed intuitive, with there being two white children and one black child among two dark-skinned black parents. But...were they? Were all three adopted? Did they come from a donor? Were they a friend's kids, taken in due to an accident? Were they foster kids who were going through the process of adoption? Kaelen couldn't know, and on some level, he didn't want to. He didn't want to project his own insecurities about his parents onto these children...but he couldn't help but feel jealous of this dynamic.

He looked in the book - he'd remember seeing the name Heath in there. Sure enough, he found it.

Heath . . . . . . Solitude.

Kaelen resolved that if Heath asked him what his name meant, he'd make up a lie.

"So...you want to make a bouquet of all these flowers," Rain asked over the voice chat, "and then have me hypnotize you into basically dreaming into the space?"

"Pretty much," Kaelen asked. He was still at the mall, just this time eating a burger in the courtyard restaurant. The books were put away in a bag, and he was using the book bag to keep his phone up.

"...do you need all of them?"

"Most of them. I have a plan, though."

"Okay, well, you figure out how to get the plants...how the hell am I supposed to hypnotize you?"

"I bought a book. It's legit, I promise. I checked."

Rain groaned. "Fine. I can do it. I'll do some online research."

"Do you want the book?"

"No, you keep it, make sure I'm doing it right."

"I mean...you're going to make mistakes," Kaelen said. He took another bite of his burger - it was a little undercooked, but he preferred it that way.

"OUCH! RUDE!" Rain said facetiously.

"Not what I mean," Kaelen said once he came up for air. "I mean that we're not going to get it right out of the gate. Getting into the dream hell is not going to be easy. If it were, everyone could do it all the time. So...we'll probably have a few trial runs before we do it."

"Look who's cool with waiting now!"

"I'm not cool with waiting." Kaelen put the burger down and picked up his phone, flicking up the call to reveal a job application for a flower shop. "I just want to get it right."