"Oh um. Yes. Are there restrictions on where you can build airports?"

"De facto definitely de jure probably? You want it to be near water if you can, it takes up a lot of space, you need room for the low-flying planes to get up to and down from cruising altitude which is like thirty thousand feet if I remember right, and it's more useful if it's accessible to a city, especially since a big airport could be big enough to incubate a dungeon all by itself now and then - not every day like a big city gets them but sometimes - and will want city-based services about dealing with that."

"Why does one need that much room and why does it need to be near water?"

"The plane has to go really fast over a longish distance to take off, and decelerate over a similar distance, and they're pretty wide, so runways are many car-roads wide and very long. And water's a convenient flat thing to fly over while still too low to go over buildings conveniently. Also airplanes are really loud."

"Why must they decelerate over a similar distance?"

"Well, they can't slow down too much in the air or they stall and crash."

"Ah, I suppose that makes sense.... who builds them in your time?"

"...big companies? Boeing. Probably also others."

Nod.

"I'm trying to think through how I would push for their construction and use in England. Or in my England, anyways."

"One hears bad things about the... baggage system? I think it was the baggage system, in Heathrow, that being the big London airport in my world."

"What sort of bad things?"

"Don't know. I've never flown to Heathrow. I have no idea how you should implement airports here."

Nod.

"If we do get contact with your world do you think they should be a priority?"

"...airports? No, not really, you don't have the industrial base to make planes and the portals we might hopefully have to work with if we're lucky sounded too small to import them, even some of the parts are pretty big."

Nod.

"I don't really have a solid sense of how industrial bases... work. Do you have ideas for what should be a priority instead?"

"...honestly I kind of want to take refugees from here but that's probably uncharitable of me. Uh, trade in general, you want that full blast."

"What sorts of things might your world trade us for?"

"Natural resources, which, uh, maybe play hardball on that at all, you only have so many, but also empowered magic. I'm sort of hoping the noble allergy to remunerative labor is a local cultural phenomenon and there's lots of people who'll play ball overseas."

"I might be able to persuade my countrymen to play nice as well - I was hoping to improve on the attitude of my culture already and having a whole other world to trade with will go a long way towards helping with that."

"What's your persuasion plan?"

"I think the basic idea is to encourage socially acceptable ways to spend wealth helpfully, while providing new routes to commercialize empowered abilities that don't carry the same social stigma as the existing ones. For the former, I would promote things like bragging about the grand hospital a noble has constructed in their city, that are costly and good. For the latter, I would want to introduce wealthy unempowered noble families to both nobles and wealthy commoners, so they could play the game of favors and politics necessary to utilize empowered abilities and sell the results to commoners."

Lucette has notes about how she'd do these things, with preliminary details as to who to bribe to host what events, what families to introduce to each other, and similar. The notes aren't incredibly specific because the details will depend on her social status after marriage, but she's made some progress nonetheless.

"How do you promote bragging?"

"Mostly by playing to nobles being competitive. So I might host an event myself at a hospital named after my husband that was about to open and give a tour, and then encourage someone to do the same with an even better hospital, and then pay a reporter to write about the Charité, a large hospital in Berlin, and maybe anonymously commission some art of hospitals as well."

She has notes on where she might build a hospital in York, who to encourage to build the second one, reporters who might be amenable to writing on the subject and painters who might create the aforementioned art.

"You don't think anyone will cotton on or you don't think that'll make a difference?"

"I don't think it will make a difference - it's relatively normal to attempt complicated social maneuvers, though typically for much less... pragmatic goals."