"Physical laws aren't consistent between worlds, and some worlds afford more opportunities than others for single or small numbers of people to effect results more or less directly. Some, though not all, of those effects are local to a particular world and those adjacent to it."

"I'm from a world with local-only magic," volunteers Mateo. "Though I don't have any personally. My understanding is they don't like to go places their magic doesn't work."

"My magic works wherever I go but you can only get it if you're from my world," volunteers Chasa.

He cocks his head for a moment. "Understood."

"So, since you're here," he says, quite calmly, "I should tell you that there is a force of attacking demons presently on its way from one of their worlds to here; they'll arrive within the next twenty years - Our information isn't good enough to tell precisely when they'll land - and they intend to destroy or enslave humanity as soon as they arrive. We expect their appearance will look like a meteor shower, and don't know where on the planet they will land."

"Do you know what general direction they're coming from?" inquires Junan.

"Yes," he says, and names a set of stars in the appropriate direction.

"Okay, we can get our forensics team on that. - incidentally, there's a recurring problem with our translation magic where with startling frequency the term for the species of the bulk of our forensics team is translated as locally malign entities even though they have human-normal psychological distribution, so we may need to patch it if it sounds like I'm saying the same thing as the meteor shower folks - 'demon'?"

"And sometimes the reverse issue with 'angel'," volunteers Vëoneo.

"Those are what we call the Enemy and our benefactors," he confirms.

"Okay, I'll send out an alert that we should let those through untranslated. Anyway, the apsels on the forensics team will try to find them, which, if they aren't magical, shouldn't be hard, unless they're coming from another universe."

"No," he says, "they're local to this one. How do your apsels' abilities work? Are those magical, too?" 

"Apsels are magical, yes, they're from the same general magic system as I am but while I'm telekinetic," he levitates and then sits down in the air, "they conjure material objects, which includes things described by 'conjurable parameters', and they should be able to find your demons and then we can see what's up with them."

"Good," he says. "So, what else can you tell me about Vanda Nosseo and these magic systems?"

"There are a lot of magic systems, but the ones in most common use are the set of spells including the teleport I mentioned - it's an idiosyncratic set, and if someone's cleared to be allowed to know the teleport they might as well also be able to heal and turn into a bird and produce illusions; a system called 'wizardry' that Mateo's picked up, which includes a less efficient teleport and a really wide variety of utility effects; magic music, which has to be composed in specific worlds but can be sung to equally good effect anywhere; an artifact generating process from the same set of worlds; the magic of fairies like myself and the similar species apsels and ksainji, plus our less powerful counterparts Limboites, all of us being indestructible on top of the first three having the telekinesis, conjuration, and matter alteration powers respectively; wishes, which must be granted in the neighborhood around the appropriately named world of Wish; servantmaking, which you have to be from a particular planet to learn and which involves creating various kinds of magical servants, as the name implies; and some of the array of powers available in Mateo's homeworld, Eclipse, most especially precognition, which doesn't work if the precog travels far from home but does work if information is going to enter the Eclipse neighborhood to be perceived there."

"And what all these essentially consist of is taking laws of physics from one universe and keeping them running in another, where they do not naturally exist but can work if imported?"

"Most people don't tend to think of magic as a subset of physics but you could think of it that way, yes."

"Yes, I thought that, too, before the angels started talking to me."

"Can you tell us more about how that happened? Are angels also local to this universe?"

"It occurred when I was selected as Admiral, and they've asked me not to disclose more about the method of contact, given the likelihood of an enemy invasion; I hardly took the idea of demons seriously before I was elected, but as soon as I was they alerted me to the situation. Angels are local to this universe, yes, we didn't know anything that wasn't, before you arrived."

"Are they liable to take it amiss if we look for them too?"

"Not at all; they're quite happy to meet new species, especially ones that might be able to assist them - do you have speed-of-light transport restrictions, by the way?"

"Nope!"

Pause.

"They will want to meet you very, very much, although since they do, they don't know this yet."

"You don't talk to them in real-time?" inquires Junan.

"They have representation here, but the majority of their population is on other worlds, and those would be steering - national policy, I suppose you could call it?"

"Huh! Representation of what kind?"

"I'd rather not discuss the details, I'm afraid; they've chosen to speak through me and to avoid sharing too much information about their internal processes, to avoid these becoming public knowledge to the Enemy. We may want to reconsider, but not immediately."

"If forensics finds those should we not visit them, in your opinion?"