"Swarms started appearing in 1420 and magical girls in 1421."

She nods. "And can you tell me more about the state of the earth, in your year? Do you know who was President?"

And she's going to follow that up with a lot more questions, as this one is answered: The last few Presidents. Brands. Prices, for anything Isabella can remember. Inflation rates. Gas prices. Political scandals, political crises. The World Wars, if there were still two of them. Cars, computers, celebrities, people she knew or who she saw on the news, and what, if anything, they could do.

The Presidents mostly don't match in recent years, though most of the historical ones do. Isabella can answer all the other questions pretty well for a person of her age who was not expecting to be kidnapped to an alternate dimension.

"Thank you," says Mya Carter, and her eyes flicker towards the star-scape on the wall.

"Thank you," says the woman on the screen, as it shifts from being a static image to a video of a woman. She's sitting in a spaceship-bridge style chair at a spaceship-bridge style desk and she isn't human, even in the picture; her face is mechanical, molded into a woman's shape; the eyes and the mouth shift slightly, but her skin is blue metal and her hair is silver wire. 

"I'm very pleased to meet you, Isabella Swan from another world. I am Minerva, and I want your help."

"...huh. What with?"

"Thank you, Mz. Carter, that will be all for today," she says, and Mya bows her way out.

And then, after the door is closed, "Minimizing the risk of the destruction of the universe, minimizing the risk of the annihilation of humanity, and trying to discern whether attempting to open portals to your universe would be the greatest humanitarian achievement in history, or the greatest catastrophe in same."

"You can do that?"

"No. But Doctor Dimensional apparently can, at least enough to make one-way travel possible, and a surprising number of supervillains are bribable."

"I'm not going to say he's not bribable but I am going to say that he didn't necessarily have the sanity necessary to carry out a project to spec. - Is something currently trying to annihilate humanity?"

"That's unfortunate. Not necessarily fatal to resuming contact, but important and unfortunate."

She pauses. "And - not effectually, at present. But five years ago a pair of teenage tinkers accidentally unleashed a nanobot swarm with no replication limit, and twelve years ago a particularly delusional supervillain launched a project to create a black hole large enough to permanently tilt Earth off its orbit, and if you go far enough back you get to the Necromancer trying to kill every living thing and barely being stopped and Tovaricho trying to trigger World War Three and Patience Cartwright dropping into a universal-solvent loaded hole and eventually one has to wonder about anthropics. From what you say about your world, we are significantly richer, we are longer-lived, we have colonized Mars, we are starting to make humanity immortal - but every time a new power triggers, we roll the dice."

"...well, we don't have that but we do have kaiju."

The image of Minerva on the screen cocks her head as if to listen. "I don't think you've explained those yet."

"Swarms start out as a few hundred bugs, not more than about a centimeter across. They act more or less together and they can still kill people like that but they're not individually durable, you can step on them. But if nobody kills them they all glom together into a larger monster, and if several of those meet up, they glom together too, and so on. So, in cities, where we notice as soon as one starts existing - by looking or by specialized alarms, though I hear they mostly do false positives - it's swarms of new bugs, but in places where we can't notice for a long time, like the middle of the ocean or in the Rockies or Antarctica or something, it's lots, over weeks or months, and if they get to be about building-sized we start calling 'em 'kaiju'. There's specialist teams of magical girls with heavy artillery to bring to bear on those."

"Interesting. Are Kaiju restricted to close-range attacks? Can they fly? How quickly do they move?"

"They don't really throw things, but they can shapeshift continually so they can suddenly extend in any direction at any time. They can fly if they're shaped for it. They're fast unless they're distracted."

Minerva nods. None of this sounds like it would have posed a serious issue for who she used to be, but who she used to be is not a relevant consideration any more, and she needs U.N. approval to break out the orbital death geoengineering laser.

"My first instinct is to ask you for numbers, but in fact I think there are a sufficient number of things I want to know about your world that it would take several months to finish asking."

"Also I don't have a lot of numbers confidently memorized! I signed up for emergency magic deployment but was never expecting to be called, have a disability that would be a liability in the field, and was instead planning to go to medical school."

"Which is why I want to hire both you and your brother."

She pauses. "To clarify, the job I want to employ you for is to write down everything you know about your world. If you would both be willing to independently record everything you know, answering questions and giving the most precise confidence intervals you can, it could be extremely valuable - to have a complete picture of a path not taken, to determine if we should be attempting to make permanent contact, and to know if there are specific powers in your world that could help save ours - resurrecting the dead, for instance."

"We don't have that one."

Her image on the screen smiles slightly. "Yet."

"Unusual powers do pop up sometimes but that one would really surprise me. I guess maybe if you have a superhero who can make people stunningly beautiful a healer might have a prayer of scaling up."

"That depends on your definition of 'superhumanly beautiful'," she says, "but if perfect shapeshifting isn't enough I only know of two entities that might be capable, and both of them are villains. There could easily be someone obscure in another country, but I don't think we can count on it."

"It's actually mostly a design problem after a certain point."

Minerva does not quite preemptively regret that she is saying this, it is where the conversation has lead her, but -

"There are certainly people who could be superhumanly gifted fashion designers, especially if they thought it would provide them with power, and/or money that they could later use to obtain power."

"At that level, though, I don't know."

(The question of whether you could fashion design hard enough to raise the dead is not one that she had previously considered!)