It could still be a dream, but Anya liked to stick with her gut instinct, and her gut instinct is that this man wouldn't spend time frolicking around dreams, and he wouldn't lie.
"I just moved in," she said again. She hadn't even read through the forums yet; she didn't know people were stories and stories were people, and she didn't know that the building was fond of playing cat and mouse with its residents. She was going to give Esme a stern talking to for sending her into battle unarmed, but now that she was there, she would have to make do.
We're on dry land, repeated the voice in her head, and it was getting annoying. "Dry land isn't anything new," she told it aloud, looking around the room, but keeping a hand on Aiden's hip. He was real and from her waking- non-hallucination; she wasn't letting him out of her sight. "They speak English, but I can't place the accent," she said, and she looked back down at the coral dress she was wearing. "1920s or 1930s."