Magic constructs could probably do those things, but it'd be a lot more expensive than just paying people to do them, and also they'd obviously be magic. (Also, she's pretty sure they could make bread? Making bread isn't any harder than the other things he mentioned.)

"How do you make the constructs if it's not wizards making them? ...And what jobs do most people do? It sounds like it's not mostly farming."

"We make machines the normal way, like craftsmen make things, out of metal and wood and so on, and power them with - well, mostly electricity, but that's too complicated to start with, do you want me to explain how a steam engine works?  And -" they're almost to the station anyway, they can take a detour to a different platform - "look at this train, it has a whole system of wheels and tracks and complicatedly shaped metal parts, but a blacksmith could make all this, right, if someone told him what it's supposed to look like and how it all fits together?  That's what machines are like.  There's no magic in this train, it's all complicated metal doing things metal normally does."

"...Normally metal doesn't, uh, move."

"Yes, that's the steam engine part.  All right, hmm--"  He has a pen in his pocket but no paper.  He can - ask to buy a small stack of napkins from the food kiosk, "I really need to explain steam engines to someone and I have nothing to draw on! Thank you!"

And they they should probably go to their platform before he gets started.  He can put his napkins on the wall so he can sketch on them.  "So first, if you just have a large fire boiling a large tank of water, you can have a narrow stream of steam that'll be strong enough to turn a wheel, the way a river turns a mill wheel, right?  This is not very useful but it's one way you can use fire to make metal move.  And then" - new napkin - "if instead you trap the steam like this with a piston in the middle, and alternate which side of the piston is getting the steam, it'll move back and forth, right?  Now here's how you use a piston to turn a wheel, and the wheel can reach back to make the alternating happen - and if you have a lot of steam and a lot of pressure, this can move a lot of metal.  This is how trains used to work - a big steam engine powering its wheels hard enough to pull several carriages behind itself." 

He is entirely capable of slowing down until she really gets it, if she seems interested, but he doesn't mind if she just wants the general idea and isn't excited about engineering.

She's not totally sure that that isn't magic, but either way she's clearly not supposed to say it's magic. She's not that interested in engineering, but if he's acting like it's important, she'll keep asking questions until it at least kind of makes sense.

He's really pretty good at drawing little models of what's going on, so she can probably get there, whether she really believes it or not.  (In the meantime their train shows up, and she gets her pick of a seat next to the window or in the middle of the compartment.)  It seems like he personally really likes the details, but the important part is just to make it clear that it's just normal things acting like they normally do but being put together in complicated ways - that anyone can do it once they know how. 

"So most people work in factories, working with machines to make engine parts or pens or shoes or canned food or a thousand other things.  Or they work in stores to sell the things, or drive trains and buses, or build houses or make roads or mine the metals and cut the wood.  Many people are still farmers, they just have machines to do a lot of the work for them.  There are teachers, doctors, soldiers, policemen, lawyers, engineers who design the machines...  I'm sure I missed some, but does that sound like reasonable work for people to be doing?"

"Some of them? I don't know, uh, some of the things you said factories make, or buses." (She is imagining someone whipping a train to make it go, even though that's probably not exactly right.) "And I'd never heard of doctors that actually, uh, work, before I came here, but if you have them, and your priests are too busy to heal people or something, then it makes sense that you've got doctors instead." 

(Teachers and soldiers and guardsmen and lawyers are all kind of suspicious jobs, but she's not going to say that.)

"... Priests can't generally heal people.  I mean, miracles happen sometimes, I think, but - I've never seen any, or heard from anyone who has."

"The circuit priest back home could heal injuries, I've seen him do it. ...If the priests here usually can't heal people then how can people tell whether they're actually priests?"

"I...'ve never thought about whether the priests are real priests?  I'm not really sure what you mean.  They do the work of priests, and that seems like what really matters..."  But he's only thinking out loud, and really she has a point.  "--No, you're right, if all the sacraments were invalid that would probably be a disaster... I don't know how we know they're real. I expect God would tell someone, if they weren't?"

"...why doesn't your god just give his priests healing, though?" Maybe their gods really are Evil? Except Asmodean priests still healed people sometimes, and it sounds like their priests do as well, just not very often for some reason.

What a question.  Why doesn't God do that?  It had never occurred to Marek to think of that as a possibility, but of course He could, so there must be a reason why not.  "So first, I don't know any of these things.  Nobody just has the ability to heal people all the time, it's-- it's as if you asked why doesn't God let everyone fly.  It's not as if He couldn't!  But if He hasn't it's probably because there's a reason things are better this way?  If I had to guess, priests can't heal people because God wants us to learn how to do it ourselves.  Or so that we come to church because we want to be good people and not just for the healing.  But again, I don't really know, and if you want to know you should ask a priest."

It genuinely doesn't occur to him that asking a priest might not be as good a solution as he thinks it is, if she's not sure they're real.

The gods want people to... learn how to be wizards? No, that doesn't make sense, they don't have any wizards (and if the gods here are Good, which it sounds like they're at least pretending to be, then they wouldn't want people casting Infernal Healing anyway).

"I think... I'm confused why Asmodeus gives people healing and your god doesn't. It's not like he's doing it to be nice, it's helpful for him if people can keep tending their fields, or women won't die giving birth." Wait, does that still apply if they've got a circuit-priest — well, sometimes, because sometimes the priest will be around at the right time.

"...And I've never heard anyone say priests of Good and Neutral gods are worse at healing." She thinks the Good gods are better, actually, but it's not really the sort of thing people talk about. 

"So... As far as I can tell no gods have ever given people consistent healing, and everything you've seen was a trick by people who really wanted to keep you under their power.  I can't really come up with explanations for why Asmodeus gives people healing and my god doesn't, because I don't believe that's true."  She's asking interesting questions, and there is a degree to which he's happy to have their conversations under the assumption that she's telling the truth.  But telling the truth is not the same as being right, and he doesn't want to end up having the sort of conversation where he's just humoring her.  That would be lying, and the sort that feels entirely pointless.

".........is there some way to use, uh, steam power, or something, to trick people into thinking that you fixed someone's broken bone, or stopped someone from bleeding out?"

"Not steam power," a bit of a smile, "but yes, I think there are ways to do that, and people have done it." 

...This is a bad argument, and he can't possibly ask her to trust it. 

"I don't know enough about them to really explain how.  It's... it's not that I think you should believe me.  You probably shouldn't.  I'm just one person who claims everything works completely differently than you think it does, of course you're not going to believe me - and for me you're just one person who claims that too, right?  I don't think we can convince each other by sitting here and talking.  Because, well, I think people have been lying to you, and you think people have been lying to me, and - my feeling that people aren't lying to me is built on so many different pieces that I can't list all of them, let alone do it so they'll make sense to you."  Most things can't be settled by sitting around and talking, or at least most things that matter.  You have to go out and try doing something.

"—I mean, the Asmodeans were definitely lying about some things! I just think it would've been hard for them to lie about being able to heal people at all. And I don't know if people have been lying to you or not, it might be that your god—" (isn't as strong, but that's probably heretical) "—would rather give them different powers instead of healing, or something."

Presumably he's being lied to about some things, like the election, but maybe not anything that's actually relevant to this.

"It does seem hard to lie about being able to heal people.  But I think it would be even harder to lie to me about there not being any such thing as magical healing.  I'm twice as old as you are, I've been to most of the large cities here and talked to plenty of people in them, I've been to other countries, I've served in the army - if there was such a thing as magic or gods or demons giving people healing powers on a large scale, I really think I'd know."

She's really not thrilled that he used to be a soldier, but that's not really the point. She also hadn't realized he was important enough to go to another country — or, no, he said he was a soldier, his country could have just had a war. Or he could have been at the Worldwound, if the Worldwound is real and exists already, except she's pretty sure that if the Worldwound is real there are definitely people there who are obviously doing magic.

"...You said it happens sometimes, right? So Asmodeus just does it more, for some reason. ...Maybe priests have to be stronger than I thought to do it, and the circuit-priest back home was actually a really important one, and I just didn't realize because he was pretending there was a whole country of Asmodeans?"

It'd be weird for an Asmodean priest to pretend to be less important than they were, though. Maybe most of the priests here are lying about being priests, and people just don't realize it because they don't know priests are supposed to be able to heal them. Maybe she traveled back in time and the gods mostly aren't strong enough to give out healing at all yet. Maybe there's... some sort of way to do healing with something like steam... and the doctor just didn't know how to do it? 

"Miracles do happen sometimes, but..."  This is really strangely uncomfortable.  He believes they do, or at least they did, but - he doesn't really believe it in a way where he would tell someone that and expect them to take it seriously, and if she is going to take it seriously then he's... really hesitant to say it as if it's true.  Probably that's a sin, and he can talk with the priest about it later, but that doesn't exactly help now.  "I've never seen one, or talked to anyone who's seen one, and many people don't believe they happen at all.  Still, that's true - and demons can give people strange powers, which is rare too, but it's possible that's what was happening in your village."  Was it?  He's still having trouble thinking of it as a real possibility.  "I'm having trouble believing it - I don't think I've ever heard of something like that happening consistently for years instead of just once or twice - but it's not impossible. I'm... not sure what it means for if the police find it."  Should he, what, tell them to take a priest?  Well, maybe he can tell Henryk and see if he has acquaintances he can pass that on to in a way that won't be profoundly weird.

"—Oh, I don't think they were working with demons, Asmodeus is Lawful Evil. ...I don't think they were lying about being Lawful."

"I... think demons can be lawful?  Wait, no, actually I'm not sure what you're talking about at all."

"...Do the priests here not tell people about being Lawful or Chaotic??"

"No?  I mean, they talk about how you should usually obey the law but you should break if it's evil - but you sound like you mean something more than that?"

...Maybe their god is Neutral, and just doesn't think it's that important or something?

"It's... the other part of alignment, besides being Good or Evil? Lawful people think you should follow the law even if the law says that everyone has to worship Asmodeus, and want everyone to obey the priests and nobles, and think the priests and nobles have the right to do whatever they want just because they're more important, and that sort of thing. And Chaotic Good people think you should do the right thing even if it's against the law, and Chaotic Evil people are... bandits, or things like that?... and I'm not sure about Chaotic Neutral. And then there's also Neutral between Lawful and Chaotic, which is in the middle — it sounds like your god might be Neutral. And Asmodeus is Lawful Evil but demons are Chaotic Evil — devils are Lawful Evil though, I guess if it's less common than I thought for gods to give people healing then maybe the priest sold his soul to a devil?

The Asmodeans said being Lawful Evil was a lot better than being Chaotic Evil, and that it was a lot better to go to Hell than the Abyss — uh, Hell is the afterlife for Lawful Evil people, the Abyss is the afterlife for Chaotic Evil people — but they might've been lying. ...I guess they might've also been lying about Asmodeus being Lawful Evil."