"You realize I mostly just don't know what you're talking about when you say things."

"Fair enough. Befuddlement is close enough to awe, as far as I'm concerned. Though, um, what exactly are you confused by, here? Do you not have a sun back home?"

"There's a sun. It stays in the sky, producing light and warmth, during the day, and during the night we can't see it, and that's all it does."

"Ah! See, we also have a Sun. He's a handsome man made of gold and fire, he has four arms, and he rules over the heavens. He imbues some of us with fantastic cosmic power - the Solar Exalted, that's us - and encourages us to watch over the rest of humanity. There's also a bright thing in the sky that does what you said. That's called the sun, but usually it's just an undersecretary of something or other who gets to drive the solar chariot. The Unconquered Sun himself has somewhat more important things to do."

"Okay. We don't have one of him, we just have the bright thing in the sky, so you can see why I would have been confused."

"Quite, yes. Very sorry."

Shara blinks at her.

"Oh! Hi, Syl. This is Sharabel. She's yet another beautiful woman who fell out of the sky and landed on me."

"I couldn't see you at first until I'd properly noticed that there was more magic around, but then it dissolved; I didn't even do anything to it."

"Shara. Sharabel Swanpennon." Handshake.

"I fell out of the sky. I was investigating something bizarre in my own world and I think I tripped."

Syl winces. "Oh dear. I'd been chasing down a gremlin when I fell down a chimney, and the chimney led... very far away, as it turned out. And so I fell out of the sky. As well. Are you also going to want to go home?"

"Ideally. I mean, it seems like it might be really productive to have some kind of stable transit between worlds for trade and so on, but I haven't seen anything here that overrides my desire to live at home and reassure my loved ones if I do have to pick one place to stay full-time."

"Well, if we can get you there once we can likely get you back and forth again, even if it's only on Calibration, or something. Which is still easily enough to trade some things - what kind of resources does your world have?"

"Ravelers. Um, I'm not sure we'll have anything else unique. What is Calibration?"

"I'll trade you definitions, then! Calibration's the day when the walls between worlds get thinner, and it's easier to summon and banish and that sort of thing. Very useful for testing out magic. What's a raveler?"

"A small percentage of people, in our teens, get 'options' - a shortlist of the possible magical specialties we can choose. Raveling takes energy to do, sort of like going on a hike or playing chess might, but it takes it all at once, not over a long period. I'm a metaraveler; with very little energy expenditure I automatically see and understand magic around me - 'understand' is less automatic than 'see', I don't have much practice with local kinds yet - and I can also edit or destroy it, although this is more expensive for me than it is for whoever made it in the first place."

"Hm. Fascinating! Depending on what the other ravelers do you might find demand for them here, but it'd have to be a long-term thing if we couldn't set up a permanent gate... That's a question for another day, though. Are you hungry? I know Aril is."

"Not very, but I could eat."

With a gesture, Syl is abruptly surrounded by dozens of pots made out of golden light. She begins pulling various ingredients out of thin air and turning them into presumably delicious food, all at an obviously inhuman rate.