"It was a closet, for me. I have no idea what this place's deal is, sorry. I'm blaming extraplanar studies majors."

Parvati blinks. "Extraplanar...that's not an area of study I've heard of."

"It's kind of niche, I don't think every college offers it."

"I see." Strange, she's done enough preparation for college that she's sure she's heard of most every possible major by now. "What college do you go to?"

"Magisterius University. You think this place is pulling from farther flung than across campus...?"

"I have never heard of Magisterius University, and have certainly never visited the campus!" she says, clearly agitated.

"Huh. Where do you go?"

"I've never heard of your school either - and no, sorry, subtle arts major aiming for therapist career, none of this -" She waves a hand vaguely. "Stuff. I'm Bella, what's your name?"

"Parvati. Pleasure to meet you," she says. The mention of subtle arts piques her curiosity, but it's already been established that this Bella person goes to a weird school with weird majors, and the strange magic bar is probably more pressing. "It seems this bar...teleports, somehow? What part of the country do you live in?"

"Prax, when I'm at school. I doubt the entire bar is teleporting, it's probably just co-opting doors."

"Is Prax a town? And what do you mean, 'co-opting doors'?"

"Prax is a province; the nearest town is Enwich. What country are you in? And I mean I don't think it put this entire bar in the supply closet, it probably just made it so the supply closet door led here."

"The United States of America, how about you? And yes, I suppose that makes sense, but the alternative...you think it's...manipulating space, somehow? Not to be rude, but that sounds slightly like something out of a terrible science fiction movie."

"The... I am not aware of that being a country. I'm from the Imperium."

"The what? Perhaps you're from another planet? Or the future?"

"Or another plane, my first guess about the bar was extraplanar studies students goofing off."

"And by plane, you mean what, exactly?"

"Well - come on, 'other planet', talk about bad science fiction - planes are - do you not know about planes?"

"No, no I don't. Would you mind enlightening me?"

"Ugh, I can't remember the textbook, so - don't quote me, but a plane is another existence in which the laws of magic differ in some ways and which can usually be accessed only by magic."

"Oh," says Parvati. "I don't know whether to be irritated or afraid or fascinated, honestly. You mentioned subtle arts, is that the sort of magic you do?"

"Subtle arts isn't technically magic, but yeah."

"What makes it different from magic? And what does qualify as magic, in your...plane?"

"Magic-detecting spells don't detect it. Divine and arcane magic have intercompatibility that subtle arts doesn't have with either."

"That makes sense." And opens up a lot more questions. But there's one she should ask first. Taking a deep breath, and crossing her fingers that the answer won't be yes, she asks, "Is any of your magic transferable? Could someone from my plane learn it?"

"You have to be born with subtle arts, although there's some debate if you can get from 'no potential' to 'some potential' or just from 'no discernible potential' to 'discernible potential'. At home anybody can pick up magic if they're smart enough, but I don't know if your plane will allow it."

"Oh, thank you," she says, smiling. Magic is much more fun when she can just study it, instead of feeling obligated to use it. "Would you be willing to tell me more? I'm afraid I've been terribly rude, peppering you with questions...oh, would you like a coffee? This is a bar, after all, and I think I have some money." She starts rooting around in the pockets of her jeans.

"Iced coffee, please. What sorts of things do subtle artists do? How much potential did you have?" She does a double take at the napkin. "Oh, is this bar run by some sort of computer? Or an invisible person?" She waves politely at the potential invisible alien.

"Oh, congratulations on being above average. Can you do pyrokinesis? I do hydrokinesis, so that would be rather ironic." She notices the napkin. "Erm, thank you? Are you alive?" (This is hardly fair, she can barely talk to humans, how is she supposed to know what to say to a bar?)

"Teek...oh! Oh, telekinesis, it's an abbreviation. That must be quite helpful for everyday tasks." Her cat, meanwhile, is winding his way around her legs in a desperate plea for attention. She picks him up and places him on a barstool, then addresses the bar again. "So, if you're a person, could you please tell me just how you managed to appear outside my living room?"

"A bowl of milk, then, please," she says. "Hmm, perhaps it would be more productive to acquire some textbooks from your plane, instead of grilling you. Erm...bar-person, what would happen if I tried to go to her plane? Would I be able to get back? And yes, just the one god. Well, I believe there's just the one god, but people from other religions think differently. I wonder if any of the gods from your plane bear any similarities to mine. I've always been a bit frustrated that we can't prove his existence, but if people worship him on your plane, that would be rather strong evidence."

"That is extremely convenient, thank you. I suppose that means it would be difficult for me to get ahold of magic textbooks from your world, as I don't speak the language or have any currency."

I produce everything I offer spontaneously. Some people can find doors whenever they want them, or on demand some fraction of the time. Some people find me often and some rarely and some only once. I must assume some people never come here at all.

"What do you mean by 'swat'? And when you say you can't do science, do you mean that you can't invent things? Or that you can't empirically test things? Or that the scientific method doesn't work? Or is it something else entirely?" Parvati suspects that the answer will not be one that she likes.

"If you try to pin down the laws of nature by running tests on them over and over to make sure they're the same, especially if you're going to do anything more important than small consumer goods with the results, your best case scenario is that they just stop being the same. You can try stuff, you can get a sense sort of by coincidence over time of how things can be expected to go, but nothing you can count on always like in - science fiction novels."

"You cannot count on the laws of nature to stay the same," Parvati says, not quite believing it. "You cannot count on the laws of nature to stay the same." Parvati takes a deep breath, then slowly lets it out. "Do you know why?"

"There's speculation. The universe is shy. The universe wants to be able to do favors to people it likes and spite people it doesn't like for whatever reasons lead it to do the one or the other. Magic and science are fundamentally incompatible - though it sounds like you prove that's not always the case."

"Yes, my magic dovetails nicely with scientific investigation," she says. "But...the universe isn't supposed to do favors or be shy. The universe isn't supposed to be sentient. It's the universe. It's supposed to follow the rules." She has to take another deep breath. "I'm sorry. This is quite a lot to take in."

"Your world sounds nice," sighs Bella.

"It is, in fact, quite nice," says Parvati. "I suppose I've never realized just how nice it is, considering. I wish I could offer you the opportunity to come home with me. My family wouldn't mind giving you a place to stay, but there's no one around who could teach you English properly, and I don't know how different our cultures are, and besides, I'm sure there's...something worth going back to in your world. Parents, or something."

"I do have parents. I could cheat on the language thing with subtle arts if I had permission but - yeah. Also, I don't know if it's safe for me to try to escape, considering the universe doesn't like it if people cheat it and I don't know if I currently count as out of reach for it."

"You think your universe could follow you to my universe?" says Parvati. She involuntarily grabs her cat and pulls him close to her, perhaps subconsciously trying to protect him from the mean universe.

"I don't know. If I knew that would kind of defeat the - thrust of the problem, wouldn't it?"

"That's true," says Parvati. "But do you suspect that it's a strong possibility? Or is it just one of any number of random things that could happen?"

"So, it's probably not a strong possibility, unless you've attracted the attention of...the universe," says Parvati. "That is good to know. Thank you. I'd...I hope you don't mind, I do like you, but would you mind terribly not putting my world at risk? I won't stop you if you want to visit anyway, of course."

"I think I've avoided getting universe attention, but yeah, I will not follow you home."

"Thank you," she says. "I'm sorry. I can't imagine voluntarily going back to a world like that, even if my parents were there. I already know I'm going to have nightmares for days about the universe suddenly deciding to act on whims. How do you stand it?"

"I focus on other things and avoid attracting notice from any gods or dragons or fae."

"Fae and dragons are on the same level as gods? What are the qualifications necessary for godhood in your world?"

"You're making it sound a lot more formal than it is. I don't know that they're on the same level - dragons in particular come in lots of kinds, some of which are much bigger deals than others - but they're all things I wouldn't want to poke. I also try to avoid dwelling on the remote possibility of ascension."

"Ascension? As in, you can become a god?"

"I am not even contemplating going there. It is theoretically possible for gods to have histories as non-god entities but they're kind of cagey about it and theologies differ on the details."

"Hm." Parvati is tempted to ask what Bella would do as a god, but decides not to poke at the subject, as it seems to upset her. "As far as I know, our gods don't work like that. Speaking of which, I think I wanted to compare characteristics of our world's gods, but I got distracted by the bar. What is...Khersis like?"

"He's, uh, very popular, a lot of the Imperium's legal and social customs are Khersian in origin. Depending on who you ask he either used to be a human good and proper, or he spent some time incarnated. His followers tend to be socially conservative and annoying and usually human or part-human."

"That sounds similar to mine, although there's been a backlash against religiously-influenced laws in my country. Mine reportedly spent some time as a human as well. There's also a stereotype that his followers are socially conservative, but that isn't at all evident at my church. What are the main tenets of his teachings? Mine's most famous for preaching about self-sacrificial love and kindness towards others. Well, technically he's most famous for some of the more socially conservative ideas, but those don't come up as much at my church."

"I don't really go in for the... details of theology. It has seemed unwise. Uh, there are Khersian orders of paladins? There's a law that anybody who's even a little bit human in their ancestry gets treated like a human because of the 'human blood, human soul' doctrine?"

"What do paladins do?"

"They're sort of like a cross between a cleric and a knight. They kill demons and undead and stuff, perform exorcisms, that kind of thing."

"Interesting. There's movies about religious authorities having the power to kill demons in my world, but as far as I know no one's ever had to put it into practice. Are demons a significant problem in your world?"

"They're not as common as some other nasties, but they're a problem when they show up. Part-demons can be bad news, too, but they can also be regular people, seems to depend."

"I see. So paladins are what priests or pastors might be, if my world had a problem with demons and other monsters. Is Khersis credited with creating the world?"

"Depends who you ask. Not credibly. Khersianity isn't that old."

"All right. My god is, but he hasn't exactly stepped forth to confirm it. There are definitely similarities between the two, but that could be coincidental, and anyway it's not enough to prove that they're the same person." Parvati shrugs. "Also, from the way you talk about him, yours seems more prone to smiting people who disagree with him. This isn't inconsistent with the way mine has reportedly behaved, but I feel like if mine wanted to smite people he would have shown up and done so sometime in recent memory. Does yours smite people often, or am I misunderstanding you?"

"Oh, no, not often, at least not lately. I just - want a lot of stopping distance between me and accidentally blaspheming actionably or developing too much hubris. So I'm careful about it to a degree that probably makes me look super pious to anyone who doesn't actually know me."

"Understandable," says Parvati. "Out of curiosity, if you woke up one day and found that your universe had picked a set of consistent rules and started following it, and gods, dragons, and fae were no longer a problem, what would you do? I'm only asking because this bar seems to be out of your universe's reach, so feel free to refuse to answer if you think I'm putting you in danger."

"Any actions you take will have consistent and logical consequences? Or am I being to vague?"

"Way too vague. I mean, I'd still want to know what those consequences would be. If, invariably and inexorably, every single time I sat in a chair it would catch fire, this would have ramifications very different from some other possible consistencies."

Parvati rubs her temple. "Yes, sorry, I suppose the phrase 'logical consequences' has different meanings in different worlds. You said people in your world have a sense of how things are expected to go. Let's say the universe's new rules fell within the parameters of that expectation."

"The sense of how things are expected to go includes gods and fae and dragons being potential serious problems."

"Right, I'd forgotten. Excepting the expectations of gods, dragons and fae? Or would that render your expectations of the world completely unrecognizable?"

"Pretty close to unrecognizable. I mean, would divine magic still work?"

"I don't know enough about divine magic to say. Is that dependent on the gods being able to randomly change the rules?"

"I don't know. I'm not a student of divine magic. It's dependent on them being gods... I'm not sure how well godhood of the kind I'm used to would hold up to - friendly causality."

"Friendly causality. I like that," says Parvati. "Why wouldn't godhood hold up against it?"

"Well, I don't know. I don't know how gods work or whether they need the causality partial to them in order to work that way."

"I'm starting to think this question is more trouble than it's worth. I suppose I could have said 'what would you do if you were transported into a science fiction book' or 'what would you do if it were safe to come to my world,' but those questions come with their own set of complications."

"Yes. Although if we picked a specific science fiction book I could answer the question, at least."

"You can go ahead and pick a specific science fiction book if you're willing to explain the setting to me so I can understand the answer. But, again, that would be putting forth quite a bit of effort just for the one question."

"Yeah, maybe not worth it."

Parvati sighs. "By the way," she says, "out of curiosity, could you technically be reading my mind right now? Based on the conversation thus far, I can infer you're not, but could you be?"

"I'm not, but I could, yeah."

"Oh, that's fascinating," she says. "I don't want to poke at the underlying mechanics too much, in case they're inconsistent and make my brain hurt, so...what's it like to read someone's mind?"

"It varies from artist to artist, but I have a passive awareness that you're there and have a mind, and I'll have that awareness unless there's something weird going on with one or both of us. Reading you would involve focusing down on that awareness - it takes a lot of concentration to sustain but not much to start. Sort of like staring really hard at a small point."

"Huh. So you don't have to put forth significant effort to stop yourself from reading my mind. That's good, I would've felt bad if you did," she said. "Do you get thoughts in words, images, or a mixture of both?"

"Some subtle artists do accidentally read minds, but I'm not one of them," Bella clarifies. "I get - thoughts. People think differently, so what I get varies, some people have lots of mental imagery and some have almost none, some are wordy and some aren't."

"Interesting. I wonder what my thoughts look like," she muses. "What kinds of career paths are available to subtle artistry majors? It feels like that would be a useful skill in a wide variety of fields."

"It is widely potentially handy, but I'm probably going to wind up being a therapist."

"Yes, you must have quite a bit of insight as to how the human mind works," says Parvati. "Impressive. I never could wrap my head around psychology."

"I'm not actually in any therapy classes yet," Bella says. "Just prerequisites. And general education stuff."

"Oh, that makes sense," says Parvati. "What are the prerequisites on your world?" A thought strikes her. "Do the rules of math change on your world? You aren't going to wake up one day and find that two plus two suddenly equals five, right?"

"...I don't think so, but I haven't done any elaborate math, it might get weird up in the complicated bits? Two and two is four; in any situation I can readily think of where that would inconvenience the universe it could just make a thing appear or disappear instead of changing the underlying numbers. Anyway, I'm in my second semester and I'm taking Utility Psionics 2, Intro to Mental Healing - there's basically no therapy stuff in there, it's like part law-and-liability, part shoring up shields so people's trauma doesn't bite us, part these-are-the-kinds-of-mental-healing-subspecialties-that-exist-now-memorize-them - and Arcane Defense and Intro Cognition and Wilderness Triage. Last semester was Utility Psionics 1 and Basic Knife and Intro Psych For Subtle Artists and Continental History."

She giggles a bit at "these-are-the-kinds-of-mental-healing-subspecialties-that-exist-now-memorize-them". "Oh, that's a relief, at least numbers are the same. Wilderness Triage is a necessary core class?"

"It fills my survival credit requirement. You take any one delving-and-discovery course - or one that's been put in that section of the course catalog and doesn't strictly contain any delving - and then it's out of the way. Supposedly supposed to reduce the number of campus deaths, I guess the weapons policy and the weapon proficiency credit weren't doing enough for that."

"Are campus deaths really such a significant problem?"

"It's really not that many, but every time there's one, they have to snug up regulations even if the snugged-up regulations wouldn't have helped."

"Ah. That makes sense. Legal issues and all that."

"Well, the campus isn't that liable, it's more PR."

"It seems odd to me that your school would be required to make self-defense and survival skills course requirements," she says. "But then, inter-world differences. I suppose you have to be on your guard against...demons and whatnot, instead of ordinary humans."

"I'm in no way prepared to fight a demon. Frankly, Basic Knife is pretty pathetic about getting me into shape if I run into a ghoul. Against humans I'd just -" She taps her temple. "Knock them over."

"If that's the case, I sincerely hope you don't run into a ghoul," she says, looking a bit worried.

"I stay on the warded paths or indoors at night. It's not hard to avoid getting killed if nobody's actually out to murder you, on campus. And if somebody's out to murder me they'll probably be other students who've taken all the same required courses or better."

"What was the previous shiny thing?"

"My hydrokinesis," she says, calming down. "I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but the existence of magic isn't widely known in my world. I'm not sure if that's because it's uncommon, or because no one else has been willing to put in enough work to make their powers do anything significant. It was...disquieting, at first, but I've managed to adjust. Because my power follows rules and allows me to investigate the reasons for the rules."

"Why don't people know about it?"

"I'm not sure. I don't even know if anyone else has them. It might just be me. Or it could be that randomly-ocurring magical powers are a recent phenomenon and those who have them are loathe to disrupt the status quo. Or perhaps no one else has been willing to put forth the amount of effort necessary to get any useful results." She smiles a bit at that last one. She's quite proud of herself for putting in the amount of effort she did.

"You might be the only person? Why don't you tell people?"

"I'm working on it," she says. "My abilities will undoubtedly attract the attention of the general public, and this is likely to be unpleasantly disruptive, so I've been putting it off."

"Disruptive to - what do you usually do with your time?"

"In my spare time, I read, but I don't tend to have a lot of spare time, what with schoolwork and math team and quiz bowl and various academic competitions and volunteer work and practicing magic and organizing my neighbors' attics and basements and whatnot for a little extra money. That's almost irrelevant, though. The sort of media coverage I'd anticipate would likely hinder my ability to attend school unmolested, at least for a while."

"You could go anonymous like a - fictional superhero."

"I did consider that!" She grins. "I may or may not have designed an outfit and picked a stupid name. Unfortunately, I don't think I could pull it off, and besides, it wouldn't suit my end goals. Which are 'use my powers to help people as much as I possibly can for the rest of my life' at worst and 'find a decent amount of other magical people, set up some sort of training program so that we can all help people as much as we possibly can, then spend the rest of my life studying magic and how it works and helping people on an as-needed basis.' In case you were curious."

"You could always unmask after you were out of school and whatever else was squared away."

"I still wouldn't have the faintest idea where to start," she says. "I mean, I've done some research, I have a vague idea of what our world's major water-related problems are, but most of them aren't in places a fifteen-year-old can easily get to. And besides, most of them aren't fixable at my current power level. I'm already doing small, helpful things anonymously, like cleaning ice off of major roads in the winter. I'll consider super-heroism again once I can control larger amounts of water and have a way to get to hurricane impact zones quickly."

"...I keep having these flinch reactions when you say things like that," says Bella.

"Oh! If I'm upsetting you, I'm terribly sorry," she says. "I'd be perfectly willing to discuss something nonthreatening with you if you'd like to flinch less."

"No, it's fine - just observing. I've very thoroughly trained myself on the hubris thing."

Parvati shivers. "I still wish I could help you with that," she says. "I know that's not actually a helpful thing to say, but, well, if I could do anything more helpful I'd be doing it."

"I appreciate that."

"Thanks. Are any of your gods relatively friendly, or are they all likely to smite you?"

"I mean - I don't want to downplay the availability of divine magic. If I went to the student healing center with a missing arm, arguably Khersis would be involved in fixing me. Divine magic is big and often, routinely, positive. Just..." Shrug.

"Comes with some pretty negative side effects? Yes, understandable. And I don't mean to be a...world snob, or anything. I don't want to act like my world is perfect and wonderful and yours is contemptible in every way. People in my world probably die of injuries that would be easily preventable in your world, for example."

"I'd actually be sort of interested to compare life expectancy but don't know off the top of my head where to look up statistics."

"Me neither! And it varies significantly by country, for me. Approximately how many countries does your world have?"

"Uh - sort of depends how you count. More than twenty and fewer than about fifteen thousand, probably."

"Wow. That is a large disparity. How would you be counting?"

"On the twenty end, it'd be - surface or routinely surface-contacting nations, most but not all populated principally by humans, that are countrylike in structure, mutually recognize each other's countryhood, etcetera. On the fifteen thousand end we start counting individual bands of goblins and pods of merfolk and certain church or monastic collectives and the occasional individual dragon and so on as sovereign in their own right, which might in a certain light be closer to the practical reality of how fragmented the world is, but would involve a lot of 'countries' partially geographically coextensive with each other, unrecognized by other countries as independent political units, and not undertaking most of the activities that are most paradigmatically country-like. Oh, and this is just the Prime Material plane, I don't know enough about the other planes adjoining it within the scope of my own world to even guess what their setup is like."

"Wow. That sounds chaotic. Wait, other planes?"

"Like the elemental planes and so on. I really don't know much about them."