"Yeah, I'm getting that impression. Why's he interested at all, though?"

He shrugs. "Why's anyone interested? I mean, my guess is that he's a first gen, trying to get back home - that's fairly common."

"Yeah that'd make sense. It's just that where I'm from aristocracy doesn't tend to... want to know things, much."

"Really? Huh. Most countries around here, the aristocracy's driving a lot of the research being done, though the merchants are starting to take over some of that, especially engineering."

"Is it because most aristocracy is first gens or what?"

"Nah, almost all of their families have been here for centuries or longer. It's just what they do? Might be a competition thing, how they've decided to show each other up what with the ley making warfare difficult. Though most research at the universities is into stuff like medicine or architecture, practical things, this is somewhat - niche. But if it works it'd be huge, you could go to farther islands, control territory better, have faster shipping. Probably why Bajilda's so into it."

"But wouldn't explain why other people aren't into it, if it's that rare."

"It's expensive, the way most people are trying - in both materials cost and lives, experimental ley-ships get lost a lot, and no matter how you do it you'll need a lot of calculators, and most places don't have a very well-educated populace. You're pretty much looking at just the big countries with solid education for a proper ley-program, and Madeza's still recovering from their civil war - they're researching it some I think, just not as much - and Frisland's spending most of their attention on faster ships. Bajilda's got, like, nearly everyone literate, and they invented universities, so they have - momentum."

"Invented?"

"Yeah, it wasn't really an idea that had occurred to people, I guess? And the two oldest universities - Elgadzhi and Khamar - are both in Bajilda. Though I'm not too sure of the history there."

"And people didn't have universities in other worlds? They're a thing where I'm from."

"Well, no one near power had had them. And if I remember right, most of the worlds haven't invented writing yet, let alone higher education."

"What, really? That's terrible."

"I mean, I'm pretty sure writing hasn't existed all that long anywhere, and if you select a person from all of history at random, chances are they've never even heard of writing. It's just - statistics."

"It's been around for at least a couple thousand years in my world, I think..."

"Well, yeah, but how long has sapient life been around? There was this big thing a bit back, the university at Elgadhzi found two people at time extremes from the same world, discovered that there was nearly a hundred thousand years between them. And that world had other earlier species, going back like a million years, but it'd had writing for, like, only a couple thousand years of that. And writing takes a long while to get widespread to the point where random people would be likely to know it."

"—wait this place picks people at different times too?"

"...Yes? It's - out of sync with everywhere else, I guess."

"...weird. And kinda terrifying. I'd hoped—"

"...Hm? Why terrifying?"

"Because I wanted to come back—I had people—"

"...I mean, the way our calculations are going, it should be possible to return at any point - possibly any point that won't violate causality, depending..."

"—okay that's more reassuring."

"Yeah, the math is weird but - it looks like different parts of the ley are - connected in a regular fashion. So people from the same world tend to appear on the same island, nearish each other. It probably works that way for time, too."

"Oh. It's hard to interpret that, I just got—equations—"