The nearest is a week's travel away, across a range of mountains.

"Alright, perhaps at some point but I feel no urgent need to make such a journey."

Very well. My acolyte is east of here. If you follow the road, I will direct her to meet with you. Would you like a guide again?

"Up to you really. If it's just following the road I don't mind walking on my own."

I will be present regardless. Should you change your mind, simply ask.

"Thank you." He starts walking.

The road is a simple packed dirt track running approximately east to west.

After a while, it starts raining to either side. The road remains dry.

"Thank you." He says out loud confident that Ellayania will hear.

Probably a safe assumption.

Slightly less than a day later, he sees a woman on the road ahead. She waves.

"Hello there are you Ellayania's Acolyte?"

"I am! My name's Pascale. You must be zabna."

"It's a pleasure to meet you. Do you have any questions for me?"

"Oh yes, lots. What's your Institute like? Who runs it? Is everyone, uh, human-ish?"

"The Institute is a complicated organization and a very large one. The Explorer corps is full of motivated people, but it's not very competitive given how much of what happens is more or less down to luck. We don't know much about most of the worlds we visit before we visit them. The Institute overall is run by a group of people called the directorate. The directorate is chosen from among the people who achieve a rank equivalent to director or above by a vote of people who have taken one of the oaths of responsibility. There's some additional complications to how it all works but that's the short version. So far everyone in the institute either was a biological human or is descended from someone who was a biological human. Whether we all count as human is a matter for some debate."

"Was it started by people from a single world?"

"Yes, humans are oddly common on a variety of worlds. Many suspect that they were taken from our world in the distant past but that theory is starting to fall out of favor with some as we discover more and more human worlds."

"And you've never come across gods before?"

"Nope. Yours is some of the most, magical magic we've found."

"Huh. I'm not really sure what a world without gods looks like."

"That depends on a lot of things. There is other magic in the universe and many systems of magic shape the cultures that possess them just as much as I would presume that Gods shape your world. The world I come from and the world the Institute started on though, neither of them had any magic for most of their history. People told stories of gods and fought wars over what those gods supposedly wanted from them but there were, at least as far as anyone can tell, no gods for them to be following. Slowly and over the course of thousands of years humanity on both worlds invented new technologies, electricity, steam engines, computers, and so many more. My original world progressed slower though, they lacked some crucial evidence for a cornerstone of the biological sciences called evolution. And without that medical care and our understanding of many things was held back."

"How did that affect medicine?"

"Well it took longer for us to discover certain aspects of how things work, especially how infections mutate in response to the attempted treatments, I'm not sure the direct causality for other slowness in medical development. Some history of science people are doing a pretty massive study comparing the histories of the two worlds."

"Weird. Perinixu's the local god of healing. Her priests do writeups of whatever treatments they do, and if you get really sick, you go to one of her temples."

"That sounds effective but not really all that scalable or likely to lead to insights and progress. Hopefully I'm incorrect about that though."