"I did say almost. The mate thing in particular is sort of disturbing. There's also the matter that I only have your word for it."

"True. I heartily recommend it on the immortality part alone, but I don't have a good way to convince you I'm telling the truth nor the government behind me with all the helpful pamphlets."

"If you were wondering, lie-detecting is not a known thing for magic in general. I seem to remember a fair folk species that can do it... I might want to hire one of them and point them at you, if I decide vampirism as described appeals after all."

"Hmmm, would inventing that be enough to make me a Fate, do you think?"

"Almost certainly. I can think of a few ways to try already, if I go ahead and wildly invent new primitive actions. I should qualify, reliable lie detecting. Polygraphs exist."

"This place is fun. I'm not sure how to meaningfully ask you what the tech level around is, so instead I'll ask, what's up with the suns? As in, what are they."

"They aaaare, flying balls of fire. Energy from nowhere. They're not made of anything, they're just regions of space that produce large amounts of heat and light on a schedule. New ones happen over continents, when the nearest other sun is too far away. The stars are the same thing but flipped schedule so they're only on at night and also much smaller and dimmer."

"—I don't want to waste time expressing a lot of surprise over that, there's too much to learn. But er. Where I'm from the sun and the stars are, yes, the same thing, which is a gigantic sphere of nuclear fusion —the sun itself is almost two hundred and ten thousand tiles in diameter, some stars are bigger, some are smaller, all are varying definitions of terribly far away."

The dictionary didn't show any atoms, so that just came across as 'fusion'. "That is incredibly fucking huge. One sun twice as wide around as the entire known world."

"And our sun is fairly small as far as stars go. My planet is only about thirty-eight hundred tiles in diameter, though, and only about thirty percent of the surface area is land, not all of it habitable."

"That's a dozen or so continents' worth. So which one of us ought to be more impressed, I wonder?"

"Me, I think. As far as anyone knows no one made my planet, it just happened, whereas your world has someone to thank for."

"You were talking about technology before - I'm not quite entirely sure what you mean by that? We have engines, they're a known quantity, some medicines, telescopes..."

"Catch-all term for stuff people make? When I say technological level I mostly mean what kinds of things the things people make can do."

"No, you used a strange word for it. Quality and quantity of shipbuilding is usually regarded as a good measure of a continent's technological level, and how many books get printed. Good public services too - especially grid water and heating or cooling."

"'Tech'? And the very presence of grid water is what I mean, as an example."

"That's better. The first word was sort of rude and dismissive, referring to mechanical things that use no magic and while I know this doesn't necessarily make something useless it's usually used to mean childrens' toys or something made by near-primitive tribes."

"That's... really interesting? I'd figured your flying house was magical but humans in my world totally have flying vehicles with no magic whatsoever."

"...Is this like gravity, somehow? Because if it's not that's really fascinating and I want to know how."

"Depends on what you mean by 'like gravity'? My world has, other than the magic, a steady set of mathematical laws of nature that everything follows all the time, and gravity's one of those laws."

"I mean how the rules are different. The only things that fly without magic that I know of are birds, and people have been trying to build fake birds here and there for a while."

"Hmm, I don't think it's about that? Your gravity feels just as strong as ours and your air doesn't seem to behave meaningfully differently?"

After the next batch of described products he glances at his pocket mirror-TV thing and- "Ah, there's the signal tower. I need to go up front now... We should start listing physical principles to each other to see if the worlds match decently well."

"I don't have a neat list, but I do have what was known of the laws of physics as formulae memorised."

Newton's laws, the ideal gas law, buoyancy all work the same. Nils is unfamiliar with electricity.