[Don't tell him I said that though. I have a reputation to keep.]

[Do you not know what a planet is, or are you merely surprised to discover that you're on a new one? What we've got here is mages and psions.]

[I... don't know what a planet is, no. Psions... I had heard stories, never met one. What kind of mages do you have? You said your magic can't be taught, so not wizards, I'm guessing sorcerers and clerics?]

[You are reading too much into your preconceptions about what kinds of magic exists. We have exactly two kinds of magic. All psions can learn the same set of possible powers, and all mages can learn the same set of possible powers; there are kinds to the extent there are specialists. Which is a considerable extent - Jackson is also a psion, he just picked up completely different powers from me.]

[Uh. I am a sorcerer. I means that I don't get magic by learning but by] being awesome [being born with it. It usually runs in bloodlines. I don't get to pick which spells I have access to, but in exchange I get more tactical flexibility and some unique powers. Mine seem to be centered about fire but I also get some quite varied healing - diseases, blindness and deafness included.]

[Neat! The language thing you did would for us be a psion sort of thing but healing and fire are both mage things. Mages affect physical things and psions interact with nonphysical things - information, illusion, intellect.]

[Those have completely different distinctions from the ones I'm used to! In general our clerics are very good at healing, good at support magic and not particularly strong at damaging foes, whereas arcane casters - I am one - are pretty good at elemental energy but usually don't have any healing - mine is an exception, and a limited one at that.]

[I'm very good with fire though. I can survive taking a particularly strong fireball to the face. Or a couple average ones.]

[Well, I have little idea what the average strength fireball might be on whatever nonplanet you come from. A planet is a ball of rock thousands of miles across, the surface of which is the land and ocean on which most business is conducted, and planets form under a paradigm according to which any sufficiently large item pulls things toward itself in the manner you appear to expect by way of knowing how to stand up and so on, such that the air and so on all stay nearby.]

[If it's a ball, which direction would be down? I guess towards the center would work but then gravity's direction would be different depending on where you are. Weeeeeird.]

[What makes someone a psion or a mage?] 

[The direction of gravity does not observably to people change with any normal transit method or a well-designed teleport because the sphere is very, very big. Psions and mages activate by what appears to be complete random chance on the lunar eclipse closest to our twelfth birthdays.]

[I see.] He's feeling uncomfortable staying in a place where he's not invited. [So it can't be taught, and it doesn't] Dimdoor [seem to come with the blood?] He's just outside the window. He looks inside and waves at Jackson and Brian.

[Right.]

Jackson jumps in startlement and clings to Brian's shirt!

[No clerics either? Actually, what's your religious situation? Which gods do you worship?]

[That question is complicated! I am willing to do my best to answer it for you but you should know that it's mostly not a topic of polite conversation.]

[I hate to be impolite, but I wouldn't have expected it to be back home, so it does seem relevant. Have you ever heard of Ezra? Qhor, my friend, is a cleric of Hers]

[Ezra is sometimes used as a male given name in the language most spoken around here but in the context you just used it it's not familiar. The state of affairs here is that there are multiple popular world religions each with multiple competing sects and many more unpopular ones besides, they are almost all mutually exclusive, in this part of the world the common ones are monotheistic or profess to be monotheistic while applying complex theology to their complicated multiple-divinity situation which remains mutually exclusive with most other religions, and many people, including me, do not believe that any of these religions describe the state of reality and instead think that the world is best understood as having zero gods in it of any kind. It's impolite to bring it up so that we can come to secular cultural compromises instead of having partisan fights about it all the time.]

[... has no one checked? You said psions can interact with information, do you have spells for seeing across planes?]

[Psions have not observed conclusive information any which way, which might be because everyone trying has done it incorrectly, because psions can't do that as a fundamental magical limit, because some effect is interfering with the attempts...]

[That seems... inconvenient. And if you don't get clerics and can't check I can see how the confusion persists... Good news though! Ezra definitely exists! She has even sent a dream to my friend once.]

[You should not go around telling people that because it's rude, and if you do decide to do it anyway, they will find it laughably unconvincing because people manage to have religious experiences about Earthly religions.]

Ok but if they don't have clerics they also don't have divine magic, while he knows Ezra is real because of Qhor.

Who is not here with you right now, so you should listen to the local when she explains how people would react.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, he knows.

[I will trust you on this. Would your magic have a way to send me back? We were kinda in the middle of something when the Mists brought me here and I'd like to return as soon as I can. I can pay of course! I only have some gold on me.] Because most of it is in the party's Bag of Holding [But if you can bring me back there I'm sure the others would be happy to compensate you too.]

[No one presently has this power. It doesn't seem necessarily out of the question for a mage to pick it up but it may take years. Eclipsed tend to be pretty rich if we want to be, and a multi-year bespoke ability pickup would be more about the possibility of controlling a bottleneck for ongoing interdimensional trade more than a one time pile of gold.]