The building seems well maintained, though not brand new. Just inside the door is a short hallway, a pair of closed doors to either side, and ahead is a doorway which leads to what looks like a bar. 

The bar is occupied, a number of patrons scattered around the room at the tables and booths in ones and twos and threes, speaking quietly. Among them is a group of what looks like humans, playing a card game with small glowing metal chips as stakes in one corner. In front of the fireplace another is drinking something hot while he reads a book, attention entirely absorbed in it. There's a couple curled up in a booth which consists of one blue-skinned woman and a feline being covered in short golden fur, his tail just visible where it's wrapped around her waist. An enormous wolf lounges on the other side of the fire from the reading human, apparently sleeping while a marble-skinned woman strokes his fur absently, most of her attention on the person she's speaking to, who seems to be entirely made of some kind of silvery metal. At the bar a short golden-winged man leans back in his seat, a bright blue drink held in his golden-glowing hand, the rest of the aura flaring with tiny whisps which escape to curl around his seat and over the bar, though they all stay within a foot of him. 

When he enters, conversation quiets for a moment as everyone looks over at the new arrival, though most turn back to what they were doing once they've taken him in. 

He's a standard human other than being a size just shy of unnatural - over seven feet tall and built like a weightlifter.  He's wearing a hardy set of hikers clothing and thick leather boots that look like they've seen use.  On his back is a 'small' pack probably heavier than most people could lift.  

Raen'Vine watches back, trying not to stare at any of the people for too long.  Some he believes he recognizes - the wolf might be a monster, the winged human a demigod - but he's never seen or heard of many of the patrons' kinds.  They don't seem to consider him trespassing, at least.  Does it look like anyone's in charge here?  Or perhaps a bartender.  

There doesn't seem to be anyone in charge - and the space behind the bar is empty. Someone must be making the drinks, though. Perhaps the winged man? He's one of the few who didn't look away after giving Raen'Vine a once over. He tilts his head curiously as the other looks around, and then lifts a hand and gives a quick wave, attempting to call his attention over. 

He's as good as any to try, at least.  "Hello, I'm Raen'Vine.  I was walking through the forest and found this place by accident.  I'm not sure where this is."

Belatedly, it occurs to him to worry about whether this civilization would be able to speak any language he recognizes.  

"Never been here before, then?" He asks rhetorically - incidentally proving that the language barrier won't be a problem - "I thought so. Alright, I'll give you the overview. This is Milliways, a place between worlds, where people from vastly different places can meet and exchange stories, make trades, and rest from their travels. Bar here," he pats the counter, "Is a person, she communicates through napkins - or telepathy if you have that - and she can provide any food or drink you might ask for, for a reasonable price."

He leans back, speaking the next bit with the air of one going down a list, "Time won't pass in your world while you're in here, there's rooms to rent upstairs if you need to rest, there's restrooms down that hall, and an infirmary if you're injured. Don't start any fights in the barroom, or security will put you in the cells for an hour to calm down - or else just kick you out, if the offense is bad enough." He hums, going back over the explanation, "I think that's about everything. Well, except that you can get back out the way you came in, though if you do that you might not ever find the place again." 

He nods, taking a moment to absorb the information before stepping closer to Bar, nodding in greeting to her, and taking a nearby seat.  He's still feeling a bit nervous, but it doesn't seem like there's going to be anything immediately dangerous here.  

He gets a napkin in return for his greeting. 

Welcome to Milliways, would you like a drink? The first is free.

"Yes, please," he says, and orders something that he hasn't been able to get since before the age of dryads began.  Dryads had invented a number of amazing advances in farming and other fields of study, but they don't have a sense of taste.  

"And, do you take chargestone-coins?" They were coins, obviously, but more akin to barter than a standardized and government-backed currency, each holding a carefully measured portion of magic which could then be expended.  Ten minutes of healing should be more than enough for a few meals, though he doesn't know how common such things are here.  

Of course, I accept all forms of currency. 

His drink arrives with remarkable speed.

Enjoy!

It's exactly as he remembers it.

He thanks her, then turns back to the demigod-looking person.  "Are you a regular here?"

"Something like that! The door comes when it comes, and all these time shenanigans do make it hard to call anyone who doesn't live here a 'regular'. I've been coming in and out of Milliways for a few hundred years by now, though, so I suppose I'm as close as it gets! I'm called the Wanderer," he adds.

"I'd say that makes you a regular, at least by my standards."  Raen'Vine does say he 'lives' in Kor Grove, more or less.  Adding it up he's spent less than 10 years of the last 200 actually there.  

"Are descriptor names with 'the' in front of them common in your world?  Or is it an effect of whatever translation magic this place has?"

"Among a certain kind of person, they are, yes!" He laughs, "I won't draw it out - the people it's common among where I come from is gods. I'm a god of Change, freedom and travel - hence the wings, and the name."

He's less affected by the thought of speaking with gods than most people in his world.  "Ah.  Wings are also a common feature of gods on Tle, though they usually have two pairs.  Those seem like good domains to have."  

"I like them! Though, most gods don't have wings, where I'm from. I have wings because of my patronages - that's the latter two, freedom and travel. Gods from my original world gain patronages which reflect the kind of people they are, and then we get marks of that. If one of my patronages changed, I might lose the wings and get something else." Which would be a shame, so he doesn't intend to do that. "The first one, Change, is the only one I didn't have any input in choosing."

"Huh.  I wonder how different your kind are to the ones in my world.  I'm pretty sure all of the gods in mine can shapeshift, and just prefer to have a four-winged body with their associated wing type as their default.  Well, other than Diamondeye, the one who I'm Champion to.  She..."  He trails off.  He's not sure at all why she looks so different from the others.  Perhaps she just has very strange aesthetics, though that would bring up the question why she's the only one that does.  Maybe one of these centuries he'll think to ask.

"We can do just about anything we can justify as being part of our domain and patronages, so long as it's in our range. Some things take more power, though, and we only have so much at a time." 

His aura draws in around him for a moment.

And then it relaxes to reveal a different face, though the wings remain.

"Shape-shifting is easy for me, so long as I'm not trying to hide my wings," she says. "Trying to do something like, say... stop someone from aging would be much harder."

"What does it mean to be Champion of a god in your world?"

"The gods on Tle are in some form of competition with each other.  I'm still not sure exactly why - they give explanations sometimes but they contradict each other.  Presumably to avoid them destroying the entire world by using their full power to fight, they have set up rules to limit themselves that all of them follow and police each other with.  One of those is that instead of directly leading their churches, they have to appoint two humans to run things.  A High Priest who can take care of internal affairs for the church, like ruling any theocracies or creating holidays.  And a Champion, who does anything outside of their territory, like missionary work or stealing back baubles that some other god's heroes ran off with.  

"Diamondeye doesn't care about followers or winning whatever competition they have.  I was appointed her Champion mostly to spite some other gods a few thousand years ago.  One of the rules that gods need to follow is that they can't kill each other's Champions except in karmic ways - a champion who assassinates people can have assassins sent after them, one who forms armies and marches on crusade can get armies sent after them, and so on.  That way, they can appoint champions without the other gods immediately smiting them.  I... managed to get a pantheon of gods very mad at me, and Diamondeye was angry with them.  As her Champion and someone doing no harm, they couldn't touch me.  She got revenge by seeing them upset, and I got to live.  Since then, she sends me on an errand every decade or two but mostly leaves me alone.  

"She's the god of Preservation.  That means I mostly get sent to help out libraries or museums.  Sometimes I'm sent to share jam recipes or other preserved foods.  Or stop a blight that's taking out all of a species of tree that should be preserved, or stop invasive rats from eating shorebird eggs on some island."

"Huh, you're older than me," is her first comment, and then, "That's not much like it was on my original world, last I was there. I suppose there is a kind of competition... Shallow Gods need worshippers, or else they Vanish. I'm this cycle's Deep God, so my power comes from a more reliable source, but you could say that the gods back there compete over followers.

"There's no rule against leading their own people, though. Most of them do. God-kings and so on rule most of the world, and even the ones who don't rule directly are very much involved in what their lands do." 

It's an unfortunately abuseable system, though the ability to undevote yourself whenever you wish does work as something of a check on the gods' power.

"Your patron is god of Preservation... she doesn't support stagnation, does she?"

"I wouldn't say so, though I suppose it's a matter of perspective and scale.  Presumably, if the rats didn't die of starvation after eating all of the eggs, in a long while there would be a new ecology there where the rat's descendants would be a component.  If a building doesn't get it's rotten beams replaced and eventually falls in, the spot would get built on by something else.  

"She's not about keeping the world exactly the way it was.  Countries still rise and fall, technology still continues.  Cities change around the handful of historical buildings saved from any given century.  She just collects pieces of the world, like museum exhibits, to carry into that new world instead of letting them get entirely erased."

She smiles, "That's okay then - that sounds like a kind of preservation I can get behind. It's the sort that insists on staying the same even when change is needed that I don't like. That's the sort I usually end up tearing down when I visit a world, whether I mean to or not." 

"That's good to hear.  The local gods who spend a lot of time on their religions will often pick fights over mere aesthetics and abstract name implications.  Or, did.  It's been pretty quiet the last few centuries."  He vaguely remembers Diamondeye being vilified as stagnation in the first society to invent electricity, which had been so focused on progress.  He'd just avoided the entire area until it had blown over.  "There was a disaster about four hundred years ago that took out a large portion of the human population.  Dryads are the main species taking over the land they left, and the gods don't seem as interested in them."

"Oh! Do you know what happened?" Just because he was alive at the time doesn't necessarily mean he was there.

"Vaguely.  I was underwater at the south pole at the time," he says, confirming his absence.  

"For a bit of background: there have always been people against fishfolk - those are the hybrid offspring of humans and merfolk.  It's one of the few things that all of the gods seemed to agree on, though I can't imagine why; every fishfolk I've met has been normal enough.  Most of the traits breed out in a generation or two, but the unusual hair colors stay.  The prejudice had gotten especially bad in the decades right before the disaster, in northern Aprimaareth, enough that a group that had taken control of one of the governments was taking anyone with pale hair and rounding them up to be killed.  Those people discovered an exploit in magic that would let them cast wizardry rituals far more powerful than they should have been able to.  They intended to create a ritual that would take out anyone who didn't have dark hair.  Instead, the ritual latched onto the fact that all of the casters were all male and killed all human females instead.

"Humanity still exists, due to fishfolk and the way half-human hybrids produce throwbacks.  The population is small but stable."

"Ah..." She shakes her head. She can't claim it's the worst thing she's ever heard of, but frankly there's no comparing tragedies like that, anyway. There's nothing really to say in response to that which isn't trite, so she latches onto another topic instead. 

"Your world has magic besides your gods'?" 

He takes a moment to consider that fully.  "I'm not sure.  At least some of the different magics are created by a god.  I know that Diamondeye creates and empowers mages, and was able to change some aspects of how our magic worked after an exploit was found in it.  I assumed that whatever exploit they used had been something like that, or maybe a combination of using magic with technology.  Would it make more sense for there to be both god-created magic systems and natural ones?"

She shrugs, "I've seen worlds with both." She thinks back to one of the worlds in question fondly, and then shakes her head, "And I've seen worlds where it turned out they all ran on the same system, and ones where the gods were actually just very powerful magic users, and ones where what the magic users thought were gods were actually just concepts attached to the magic... the list goes on." 

He's fascinated by the different places and wants to hear about them all!

It's also making him curious about where Tle would fall into things.  Many of the possible theories would look the same from his perspective, and he's not sure what tests would turn out differently depending on which one was true.  Is that something that The Wanderer's kind of god can tell by looking?

Not exactly. She can tell just by looking how difficult something or someone would be to change, and usually has some idea of why - the more magical something or someone is the harder it will be, with a few exceptions. Gods are usually at the highest end of that, though extremely powerful magic users can reach that point, too. In the past she'd often found out the truth of it from the people she encountered in a world, or even from the gods directly. Being a strange god in a world with gods can draw their attention. 

She's happy to tell him about them! She'd actually been to three worlds with the concept-gods before she found out about that - she'd thought they were just very non-interventionist, outside those specific rituals which called on them. The people there had external souls, which, for most of them, took the form of animals... 

She can spend hours - more than hours - talking about places she's visited, though she's also very curious about his own world. 

He orders another drink, then can talk about the things that immediately come to mind about Tle.  

There are a few species wandering around.  Humans he'd mentioned, and merfolk in the oceans with their caste-like divisions between genders and age groups.  Dryads - plant people who travel around the world as archaeologists and explorers until they grow too large and plant themselves in a Grove.  Groves are their cities, created out of and run by the combined minds of all dryads who make them up.  Dryads are the youngest species, having only been created after humanity's fall.  Solon - tentacled people known for their complex systems of etiquette.  Solon are relatively new as well, brought from another world by the gods less than a thousand years ago.  The gods themselves, if they count as a species, and their children.  With sapient species, a half-god is otherwise their mortal parent's kind but with wings.  With animals, the resulting offspring are larger, sapient, and usually have some unique trait like strange coloration or extra limbs.  

Technology continues to advance.  Places where people live are wired with electricity, running televisions and factories and various machines that have replaced household tasks.  The last time he'd been in civilization, everyone had been talking about a dryad who had been sent into space.  There are apparently plans forming to land briefly on one of the moons.  

He also mentions his own job.  Ara'Vine is a mage, whose mage-power of healing and shapeshifting is especially useful for medical research and creating new cultivars of plants.  It takes a long time to build up enough magic to do anything, meaning he spends most of his time out in the wilderness.  He used to handle the plant and vaccine creation himself, but between the Groves' intelligence, memory, and attention capacity it's now more efficient for him to just hand them chargestones filled with his mage-power every so often.  

There seems to be humans just about everywhere! She's curious about the ones in his world - he'd mentioned that the population was small but stable, what kind of numbers does that imply, do they all live in one area or are they spread out? 

Wandering around learning about history sounds like a good way to live, to her. Are the older dryads happy in their groves? If they don't want to plant themselves, can they stop it somehow? Does he know why the Solons were brought to his world?

Her kind of god doesn't have 'demigod' children - they're either mortal or they're gods themselves, and making a godly child takes a lot of power. The more aquatic species' demigods would have wings too? Her own wings don't get waterlogged, and she's figured out how to use them to aid in swimming, but regular wings would be very inconvenient!

Oh, the space age! She's only run into two worlds that were past that point in development, she'd spent centuries in one of them, exploring the cosmos, before a companion had gotten a door to Milliways. She could have spent centuries more there, otherwise, working with their exploration corps. 

Mages have limited amounts of magic? He'd mentioned that Diamondeye created that system, was there a reason for the limits she'd placed on it? That might tell him something about magic in his world in general. 

Raen'Vine's not sure exactly how many humans there are.  Maybe a million, but he could be off by an order of magnitude for all he knows.  There's a small city in/near each Grove, and a few smaller outskirt settlements heading farther away.

Dryads have a few options, though none are great.  They grow constantly, and their minds and memories are decentralized throughout their entire bodies.  If they don't want to plant themselves, they can cut themselves in half and become two smaller dryads with half of the original's mind each.  They can also cut off pieces and send them to be grafted to a grove.  They have some control over where each memory is, but it isn't perfect.  Oh, and at least one dryad has decided to turn an old boat into a chassis and now goes up and down one of the larger rivers.  

Merfolk have wings like flying fish or manta rays or penguins, or extra and more elaborate fins.  Even if they were given flying wings, there's only so long they could stay outside of water without suffocating.  Raen'Vine doesn't know of any fishfolk demigods - the gods really hated them up until a few centuries ago and have been distant since.  He's also never seen a dryad demigod, or any plant monsters in general.  

There does seem to be a limited amount of each magic being put into the world at a time.  This comes up in every system he knows about.  Vampires only rise if there aren't too many vampires around, pegasus won't breed until the total population is low enough no matter how far they get from the others.  There is only so much orichalcum, and only so many other artifacts lying around.  Potions take special liquid as a base, which comes slowly from certain fountains.  There can be - could have been, he corrects himself, as wizardry seems to have vanished - as many wizards as they want to share their power with but the more wizards there were the slower each one would regain mana.  That meant that sometimes there would be a few very powerful wizards, and sometimes many who could barely light candles.  

One magic system he vaguely remembers from long ago had also vanished.  It involved wrapping up poppets of herbs with a single human hair, then throwing it into a fire to cause effects to that person.  Different combinations of herbs did different things.  When the herbs were rare and gathered naturally, the magic worked consistently.  When they began being farmed, the magic was unreliable, working only so many times a day at random and often doing nothing at all.  People would forget, and after a time it would be rediscovered, to repeat the process over and over.  He assumes the god stopped... doing whatever it was they did to make magic work, at some point, but he's also never bothered testing it.  Most magics that increase or decrease someone's strength or speed or such usually make him nauseous when combined with his own power.  

Mages - there are only so many mage-hearts that can transform people into mages.  Each will regenerate 5 to 10 hours of magic in a week.  He gets 6, himself.  He's not sure what causes the slight variation there.  They can store as much as they want in chargestones, and to an extent overdraw some extra if they want to deal with some unpleasant side effects.

The boat idea is very clever! She wonders if she could help others who want to stay mobile - a Boon could probably do it, though there's no guarantee that's what they'd get if she made them one. 

It does sound like the amount of magic in his world must be limited, somehow. Only so much at a time to go around - maybe if the gods do create each system, they also only have so much magic at a time? Systems stop working - or are less powerful, at least - when more people are using them - that sounds like they each have a reservoir of magic, and once it runs out... 

"That's my guess too, regarding the magic.  Only a guess though - the Tle gods like to lie about things and give conflicting answers, on the rare occasion they'll sit down to answer questions at all.

"What are Boons?"

"Magical artifacts - I can make one per non-worshiper person. They always turn out to have an ability that will be very useful to the person they're made for in the near future, even if it's not obvious how at first. The powers are always related to my Domain - I've gotten everything from a mask which changes your face, to a harp which alters the player's emotions to match the song, to a ring that changes your sex." 

"For anyone who doesn't worship you?" he asks, confused.  Raen'Vine is trying to keep in mind that the rules are apparently very different, but that seems even more counter-intuitive than not having a limit to how many can be made.  He wants to know more about how they work.  

"I can make more for those who do," she explains. "The magic - all our magic - runs off of belief. Not in us, necessarily - though it can be that - so much as in our Domains and Patronages. Most people only produce enough energy to reliably power one Boon. I could make more, but they'd eventually stop working if the person they belonged to didn't have enough belief in my portfolio. Meanwhile, we can power our followers' Boons off our own aura if we want to - and actual followers tend to have more of the necessary belief anyway."