A silvery sphere it's surface a perfect mirror appears a scant millimeter above the ground. It vanishes as soon as it appears revealing someone who looks human with his feet slightly above the ground. He lands in a crouch that straightens. On his back is a fair sized backpack but there are no straps apparent to attach it to his body. He seems unbothered by the rain.

Hmm? That was unexpected. People don't just- appear. Gods do, sometimes, but he's not a god. She would be able to tell.

Wait and watch, for now. What does he do?

He starts talking to himself, in a language she has never heard before. "Transition compete, time beacons reading as expected." Then he pulls something out of his backpack and fiddles with it for a moment. After that his words will come in the most common language spoken by the people near here. "Translation appears ok."

Interesting. What is a time beacon? Worth investigation.

The downpour stops abruptly, and sun breaks through the clouds.

A large heron stalks out of a nearby clump of trees, approaching the man without any sign of fear and peering at him inquisitively.

"Hello?" The man pulls something else out of his backpack and a glowing field of light appears in front of him. It shows the layout of her domain for one hundred meters in each direction. "Wow, you're really really magic."

The heron looks at him, expectantly. Then it shakes its head and taps a claw on the ground, where some writing has appeared.

Can you read this?

"I can, my name is zabna tsani, I'm an explorer for the Starlight Institute for Advancing Studies."

The writing melts back into the earth, and new words form.

I welcome you, zabna tsani, to my domain. I am Ellayania of Library and Fen. You are apparently insensible to my normal method of communication. Why is that?

"You're really really magic, my mind, and my body are protected against all magic. It's a safety precaution to protect explorers like myself from being compromised and turned against our colleagues."

I see. For what purpose do you explore?

"The Institute's core mission is to learn all there is to learn, and teach all who would be taught. We explore to find more people to learn from and teach."

Where do you come from?

"I'm travelling from an exploration hub we call The Edge of Eternity it's a place we built to coordinate the efforts of explorers within a week's travel of the hub."

Not on this world? Do you have gods?

"This world is about four days travel from the hub. My people have encountered many cultures who worship either imaginary people, powerful non-sapient magical effects, or powerful humans as gods. I do not know quite how to answer the question beyond that."

Gods are a feature of this world and are not quite like any of the phenomena you describe. A god is magical being who exists within a defined area of land, referred to as their domain. Within their own domain, a god has absolute control of the land and can dictate weather, soil composition, plant growth, and so forth. If you were not warded, I could even speak to you directly.

"Interesting, that's a more comprehensive level of power than any we've encountered so far. Is your attentional capacity similarly vast?"

It scales with the size of my domain. In a very real way, I am the land. The more of me there is, the more there is to go around. In addition, gods have the capability to bestow blessings upon mortals, which are minor beneficial effects. I offer the blessings of speed, stamina, vision, memory, waterwalking, and resistance to cold and damp. If a mortal is very favored, a god may choose to make them an acolyte, investing them with a portion of their power and granting an additional ability. My acolyte has access to a memory palace, which stores and organizes all the experiences she has lived and allows her to show them to others. Any avatars of mine have the same ability.

"Ah, those certainly sound like useful abilities. You seem quite unlike anything we've previously encountered."

In your current state, I doubt you would be able to receive any. One of the most basic powers of a god is the ability to speak and understand any language their audience has. You are blocking that and I doubt blessings would get through where that failed.

"That would be my assumption as well, I'm also unsure whether abilities intended for baseline humans would work correctly when applied to an individual like myself."

They function on animals acceptably well.

"Fascinating, I suppose it depends a lot on the way the underlying magic has learned what targets are allowed. In many respects animals are more like baseline humans than I am."

What are you like, then?

The skin on zabna's hand splits along a previously invisible line in the palm. His fingers go limp and a mass of metal rods pack away the now empty skin in his wrist. Where his apparently human hand was there is now a veritable forest of ever thinner metal spikes. "I'm a human mind wearing an ultra-articulate body. If this body was to be destroyed I'd wake up back at the hub missing some memories but otherwise intact."

How curious. Such technology is beyond anything I have heard of.

He restores his hand to the human appearance. "The institute has had the technology for the last couple decades. It's based on a lot of prerequisites though."

Are you willing to share the information?

"Standard uplift procedures involve explaining the workings of all our technological capabilities including that, we try to do it carefully though, our technology can be used to do terrible things more easily than it can be used to do wonderful ones."

Goddess of libraries, remember. I am good at taking care of knowledge.

"You will forgive me milady but we have no particular guarantees of your benevolence. Perhaps your domain will be selected as the site to host one of our copies of The Archive on this world but I am not empowered to make promises like that under normal circumstances."

Perhaps I might show you more of myself, then?

"I would be delighted. I can't fly like your avatar there but I can run pretty fast when I need to."

My nearest temple is some distance away. Follow the heron, and speak up if you require a rest. The bird waits for him to read the message, then sets off at a quick trot.

zabna easily keeps up, his eyes drinking in the terrain. "Is there a good way for us to communicate while we're running?"

No. The word appears on successive trees.

"Alright, I'll save any questions till the end."

They pass through forest and fog, ponds with thick reeds poking through and apparently grassy expanses. The ground the heron guides him over is mostly solid. Slightly squishy, but he won't be leaving any boots behind. The entire region seems to be wetlands of one sort or another.

He looks a little intrigued, "Well I see why waterwalking would be useful," he muses.

Eventually they come to a road and can make better time. The mist thins out and they pass by several rice paddies.

And then there's a village, a small collection of wood and stone structures with a smooth grey building in the center. It is there that the heron guides him.

He follows the heron in. Presumably this is her temple. What does it look like inside?

The inside walls are the same grey stone as the outside. Ensconced candles along the walls provide ample light, and there are several arrangements of comfortable-looking chairs and bookshelves. Directly across from the entrance is a raised slab of dark stone that is presumably an altar.

"Nice place you have here. Does your power let you keep the candles burning indefinitely or do they need to be replaced occasionally?"

A book appears on the altar. The heron walks over and taps its beak on it.

zabna walks over and opens the book

I am still unable to converse with you normally. This village is too small for a full-time priest and my acolyte is at least a day of travel away. To answer your question: no, I cannot create an everburning candle, but it is trivial for me to replenish them.

"That's really interesting. So you can create matter but not persistent magical effects outside a limited set? Are there any limits on your matter creation ability?"

It is not creation. It is transmutation. I take material from one part of my domain, change it, and move it to where it is needed. I must understand a thing in order to make it.

"Alright, that's slightly less impressive but still useful. How much detail do you need to know about a thing in order to make it, like do you need to know precisely which compounds and in which ratios are in the things you're creating?"

Yes. Usually I have an example of the thing I am making in my possession already, as that is the easiest way to provide the necessary information. I have not yet come across a satisfactory notation.

"Interesting could you manufacture simple things like pure water without an example of that at hand? Can you make gold from silver or are you just rearranging the atoms that are present?"

'At hand' would simply mean that it was at one point part of my domain. I can either alter the atoms or rearrange them.

"By pure water I meant the most common molecule in water with no other materials dissolved in solution. Unless your world is greatly different from my own I would not expect to find that occurring naturally. As a warning, biological beings are not well suited to consuming pure water, it will disrupt their ability to function in a way which is related to the issues saltwater fish have surviving fresh water."

It does not exist without intervention, no. But my analytic abilities are more than adequate to the task of separating the components.

"Hm, can you manufacture a substance called 'Graphene' It is carbon arranged in a hexagonal pattern one atom thick. It is one off the simpler to describe substances that has target unusual properties."

That would not pose a significant challenge. I do not see the purpose of a material so thin, however.

"Among other things it's a very good conductor of electricity. It can also be used to filter water but using it for that produces pure water which is mostly useful for use with machines. Being able to produce graphene also means you can probably produce carbon fiber which is lighter and stronger than metals for most purposes."

What sort of machine requires pure water?

"Impure water leaves behind residue when boiled so any machine that relies on repeatedly boiling and condensing water will have a longer usable lifetime with pure water. Pure water is also more useful for cleaning sensetive machinery. If you're aware of electricity, pure water is safer than other types of water for extinguishing electrical fires because it's less conductive."

The only way electricity is involved in fires on this world is if lightning strikes a dry grassland or forest.

"Huh, that's pretty unusual for a world with detailed knowledge of subatomic structures. Your magic has skewed your world in a fascinating direction."

Library goddess. I dare say I have a far more complete collection of the knowledge available in this world than is usual.

"Ah, are you more able to transmute elements as a result of that knowledge or are other gods simply less interested in the mechanism of their powers?"

Less interested. There is no indication of difference in skill beyond what can be explained by simple power level variation.

"Have any gods leveraged their knowledge into... No zabna do not give out the knowledge to produce city destroying weapons to satisfy your idle curiosity."

No. But now I am interested.

He sighs, "Some types of atoms are not entirely stable, this can result in chain reactions with far more energy output than traditional chemical reactions. Such explosions are dangerous even beyond their raw destructive power because they produce poisonous materials that persist in the environment."

That sounds rather irresponsible to use if one is not a god and capable of cleaning up after oneself.

"The world The Institute comes from initially used them before the long term consequences were well understood and then again to destroy things even more dangerous."

I do not approve of wanton destruction in the general case.

"Nor do we, it results in the loss of lives and knowledge."

What other technologies do you know of?

"The Institute has had centuries of time to develop technology it would be difficult to list all the technologies we have. The ones that are most straightforwardly useful at your level of development would probably be indoor plumbing and electricity. At least to your followers. For yourself electricity can lead to computers which can effectually store libraries worth of information in a space smaller than my littlest finger."

That would be impressive. Do you have any of these devices?

"At a certain level of abstraction I am one. But I do also have more readily distributable versions, The primer tablets which is what we call the devices we've designed to distribute recharge if left in the sun. They have all the knowledge relating to our nonviolent technologies which aren't ludicrously dangerous, though with time and study you can get from what we give out to where we are." He produces a rectangular device about a centimeter thick and the size of a large book and places or on the altar.

It sinks into the altar and disappears.

Yes, some of this would be very useful indeed. I believe I will edit it into something more compact and distribute it in a format more familiar to my worshippers. Would you like the device back?

"I have a limited number with me but it's inexpensive for us to make more, I'm mostly alright either way, I am curious whether you can produce a copy of it."

I can. The device reappears. Similar in principle to copying books, once I grasped the means by which the data was encoded.

"Well, that's really impressive, I expected you to be able to reproduce it but to reverse engineer the data encoding that speaks to a level of pattern recognition which is beyond anything I had imagined."

I believe I have mentioned the word 'god' several times by now.

"That you have. I think my confusion is just that the word God does not match to the meaning you intend in my mind. To me the word means any of a half dozen things none of which are anywhere close to your level of intelligence."

One of the advantages of my normal method of communication is that is impossible to misunderstand me.

"That sounds strange, it sounds useful to be sure, but I don't know how that routes around disagreements, especially disagreements over words. Can one still disagree on matters of fact or opinion with a god?"

Yes. My point of view would not be enforced, you would simply always be able to tell exactly what it was.

"Alright, that sounds useful, maybe we'll have rewrite our translation systems to work like that. I think it'd have to be written into the antimagic somehow. I can see the beginnings of how I'd modify the arrays but that would still be really difficult."

Do you have a means of contacting your colleagues?

"Oh, they're getting my sensory input, and some mental commentary in real time, well as real time as possible when they won't get the message for four days."

Some sort of recording device? Related to your robotic nature?

"More my robotic nature than a recording device, my memories are also being updated to remote backups in regular compressed bursts."

Do you have any philosophical concerns with spreading yourself in time and space like that?

"Not really no, there's four copies of me that I know of. I was born on a world far from the institute, I got copied by powerful magic with something of a mind of its own, and two copies have been derived from that one, me and another who is travelling back to the world that I was born on."

I find the concept of distributed disconnected consciousness odd. I am distributed, but never disconnected.

"It was troubling when I first realized what had happened, but only because of the difficulty involved with seeing those I love again. I would be surprised if you could maintain that connectivity between different planets. Nothing we've encountered so far has been able to send information faster than light, and while light travels extremely fast, it is not infinitely fast."

I know of no interplanetary gods.

"Given that you lack knowledge of people using electric lights I'm not surprised, it's rare to have rocketry before electricity, though I suppose it's possible a society with gods like yourself might be able to find a way."

Perhaps we will be able to undertake the experiment in the future.

"That sounds like an interesting thing to try yes, if you can break the speed of light barrier I will admit that will alternately excite and terrify my superiors."

Why would it terrify them?

"It means that a lot of limits on what can happen are broken. Most of our plans for defending ourselves from attack are based on enemies moving at most at the speed of light." 

How does one achieve such speeds?

"There are paths through reality which we call threads. You can through either certain magics or advanced technology throw yourself into a thread. While you're in a thread you're travelling at the speed of light but no time passes from your perspective. You can ask magic or someone else at your destination to pull you out, though it is possible someone you weren't intending to meet can pull you out instead. Our first line of defenses for our worlds rely on pulling people out before they get near our worlds."

I have never heard of this sort of thread before.

"That doesn't surprise me, they're only really useful when you have the technology, or a form of magic that lets you make bobbles [zones of frozen time that dissipate after a certain amount of time has passed in the outside world]. The local language doesn't have a word for that though so I doubt you have a way to create them."

No. Perhaps there might be a god who has an acolyte power along those lines, but I do not know of one.

"If you were watching my arrival the silvery sphere that preceded me was a bobble."

Ah. One small mystery solved, only to be replaced by a greater one.

"What greater mystery are you referring to?"

How the bobble is created and manipulated.

"That is unfortunately not a question I can answer for you. It's a lot of physics and math that is more sophisticated than I understand, and for information security reasons I'm not carrying a textbook."

Unresolved questions give direction to life.

"Indeed they do, that's why I'm an explorer."

Do you require food or lodging?

"Depending on how long I'm here I'll eventually need free space in direct sunlight. Otherwise not really no."

Then would you perhaps like to meet up with my acolyte?

"I'd be delighted. I'd also be interested in meeting your neighbors."

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."

"Well, we're sharing the tablet with them. We can see what they make of it.

"That's true you aren't on your own anymore. Given some time my superiors will start organizing a larger expedition and that team will be able to help construct a comprehensive plan for rolling out the technology the residents of your world want and the knowledge of how to use it responsibly."

"How long does that usually take?"

"Usual time windows aren't too applicable here. Your magic is more comprehensive and harder to analyze than most systems we've seen so far. That's going to make my superiors a lot more cautious. Still I'd be surprised if the survey team wasn't here within a couple weeks, and the working group would follow a couple weeks behind that. The survey team will take a census of your world, and check for any nasty hidden surprises, assuming they don't find anything that would threaten a working group the working group will follow as soon as they get the all clear."

"Will they be consulting with us on the rollout?"

"Of course, the technology we have can drastically reshape a world, there are limits on how fast we'll roll out certain technologies but we won't force any world to accept our gifts."

"Is there a unifying political body or is it just your Institute?"

"We mostly handle interworld affairs, in theory one of the old governments could do it but most of them don't have quite the political will."

"That'll probably make things easier. Arabek isn't exactly politically unified either."

"I wouldn't expect it to be yeah. Some of the other worlds we've contacted might eventually become politically unified powers that want to do interworld diplomacy, but most of them are still busy with their own technology rollouts."

"How many worlds have you found?"

"We have contact with about fourteen at the point, we're aware of a number of others but most of them are too far away for us to feasibly contact. Most explorers are sent to visit worlds where there is no intelligent life, or active magic."

"Can't your bobble-thing get you there?"

"Time won't pass for the person travelling, but many of the places we have not yet chosen to visit are months or even years distant. It would be exceptionally difficult to make useful contact with that sort of lag-time to communication."

"That makes sense. Why prioritize places without life or magic?"

"Oh, I'm sorry for being unclear, we're prioritizing based on distance. It's just that most of the close worlds are without intelligent life that our magic recognizes. We have a tendency not to trust our magic though so we go out to look at those worlds anyway, besides, a lot of them are very pretty, or do have life just not life that is intelligent at the level of you or me."

"How does your magic recognize people?"

"So, our magic learns based on examples, you can use certain artifacts to peer back into the history how what magic thinks is a book or a person or a boat. Really far back in time as far back as we can look, magic was taught to look for some specific microscopic incredibly dense beings and also humans as people. When we did the first uploading experiments those were not initially classified as people but eventually that problem got resolved, we're still not sure quite how magic made the jump. That makes us reluctant to rely on it for identifying non-human intelligence."

"So it's... context?"

"We don't know. Magic might have learned to extend the definition of person itself from context or maybe someone else who understands magic better than we do extended the definition of person to include uploads. These sort of uncertainties are why my people try to avoid depending on magic."

"Have you tried getting it to recognize other sorts of things?"

"Oh sure, we've run a variety of tests with magic's ability to learn. We've also studied the definitions of terms defined a long time ago, like what counts as a boat or a book. Boats apparently counts submarines but not airplanes. Books seem to refuse to count computers."

"What all can your magic do?"

"That depends on how long you want to spend teaching it, and how many motes you have available. At its most basic, magic can apply forces to objects, create light, create matter, gather information about the world, learn from patterns, do computation, move things into sublayers, pull things out of sublayers, bobble things, interfere with bobble creation, push things into or pull things out of threads and send messages. There were also a lot of less basic compound operations that were taught to magic a very very long time ago, one of those is to recognize people, another is to create illusions that only one or a small group of people can see. It's nearly impossible to use complex magic without that illusion capability providing debug output so I'm not sure how the system was used before that capability existed."

"Carefully, probably."

"Yeah, maybe. The origins of magic are still pretty much a mystery to us."

"How long have you had it?"

"I got forknapped by Wanderdeep about five years ago now. I discovered the Institute about two years after that."

"Fork... napped?"

"The magic of Wanderdeep decided I was a good candidate to wield magic so it made a copy of me and placed it in Wanderdeep."

"That's... alarming."

"As far as I can tell, it won't pick someone else that way until all the current wielders are dead. And in the three years since I've found the Institute, Wanderdeep has picked another four people from the various researchers that have been stationed there."

"Has anyone tried to make it- not do that?"

"We're really not sure where Wanderdeep comes from so we're planning to just cooperate with it and ensure there are always active magecrafters instead of trying to destroy its core structures. It's too useful to risk destroying it entirely."

"Okay."

"So, do you know how many gods there are roughly?"

"It's hard to say for sure. We know there's at least two other continents but there's not much travel between them. If I had to guess, I'd say... four hundred. Maybe more."

"That sounds really small at first but then I remember the whole god thing, actually how big is Ellayania's territory?"

"Around 1200 square miles."

"So your world is smaller than mine or has more ocean or there's a lot of area that's not claimed by any god."

"Ellayania's on the smaller side."

"Oh, that would be another possibility wouldn't it. How do gods differ? What leads some gods to be larger than others?"

"There's a lot of factors, but one big one is positioning. Gods need worshippers to grow. If they're in an area with fewer mortals, they won't be able to grow as big."

"Huh, I guess that's one way to design a system that will hopefully put good people in power. Well, depending on how easy it is to coerce worship."

"It wasn't designed by anyone. It's just the way the world works."

"Um, maybe, but it could also be that it was designed too far in the past for anyone to remember."

"Theoretically."

"Sorry, I don't mean to offend. It's just the considered opinion of the Institute that of the magic we've observed so far it looks like someone built it rather than it arising naturally. I'm not sure whether that would carryover to this world and its Gods but it's my default hypothesis."

"Might want to keep that one to yourself. Some gods might not take kindly to it."

"I will avoid expressing that opinion then."

"Ellayania doesn't have a problem with it, but it's something to keep in mind if you go touring."

"Yeah, that makes sense. I usually avoid criticising local beliefs about origins stories for their world and such."

"What other ones have you heard about?"

"There's a pretty wide variety, they usually involve some sort of creator deities.  There was this one somewhat polytheist one where there was one creator god who sung other less powerful gods into existence and taught them to sing in turn. None of the gods were in evidence when we visited but there was a music based magic system. Some of their spells were really beautiful."

"Do you have any recordings?"

"Sure, let me play one of the waterwalking spells. Unfortunately, I don't count as a valid caster so it won't do anything but it sounds nice." He gets something out of his backpack and soon there's a quiet contemplative song playing. Ellayania will be able to understand the words that sing about water flowing smoothly and holding together.

"Who counts as a valid caster?"

"With most of the magic systems we've found so far it's mostly heritable with some additional fuzziness where people either unexpectedly are or are not magic users. Idelia follows that rule. Magecrafters, Wanderdeep's empowered, probably don't, one of the magecrafters known to the Institute had a child and they don't have the power."

"Idelia is the songs?"

"It's what they call their world. They call the songs Omecani, the closest translation is 'The Music of Creation.' They sing a lot, even leaving aside the magic music."

"I suppose there are worse ways to run things."

"There certainly are. I wasn't the explorer on site for that one but I've visited. It's a really nice place. It has its problems but everywhere does."

"How often do you find new worlds?"

"Find isn't quite the correct term. We're gradually expanding our sphere of influence and we're trying not to send explorers too far in advance of our ability to offer support. It takes a lot of nearby infrastructure to handle the integration of a new world, and we also have military forces built up around exploration hubs in case we encounter anyone unfriendly. We're just starting to explore your local neighborhood. We know of three other likely candidates with some signs of magic and one other non-magical world with humans and about a hundred worlds that we think might be life-bearing in this area."

"What usually happens when you make contact with a world?"

"Well, usually, the explorer on site has a series of teleports mapped out. We talk with the people we encounter and travel between different areas of the world. Under some circumstances, an explorer will contact local governments and open negotiations but usually that would be left to the survey teams. They have more specialized ambassadors with them."

"How long's the delay between explorer and survey team? I know there's there's a four-day communications lag."

"Survey comes once I've finished my initial look around and I send back that I don't think there's any existential threats. Tentatively, I think that's the case. I'll probably jump to at least one other section of this world before I send the all clear though."

"You might want to be a bit careful teleporting into random domains. Some gods smite first and ask questions later. Not many, these days, but some."

"Huh, I guess I'm protected from direct magic but any moderately creative god could get around that. I could just travel between the domains on foot but that would be a pain. Hm, Ellayania would you be open to helping me build one of Arabek's first airplanes?"

"She says yes, but only if you agree to tell the people you meet that she did."

"I have no objections to doing so. Hm, it'll take me a bit to draw up plans but I can probably keep talking while I'm doing it. Anything else you wanted to discuss?"

"Are you going to need specialized tools?"

"My body can replace most tools that are not specific to nano-assembly, how good a plane I'll be able to produce will depend on how able Ellayania is able to duplicate things I couldn't assemble myself."

"Like what?"

"Like more solar fabric, a better motor than I could make out of ore I mined myself those are the big ones. I could also use some composite materials for the body and wings instead of trying to find aluminium or settling for canvas."

"How big is the plane going to be?"

"Big enough for me and my backpack. Not much bigger than that though, large wingspan say ten and a half meters."

"That... should be doable."

"Wonderful, I think I have examples of all the components I'd want with me for Ellayania to look at and I can explain how she might use each of them to aid her people should she choose to."

"We'd appreciate it."

"Alright, I've been writing up the specs of the plane in a side-channel of my mind. Let me just transfer the data to one of the tablets so that Ellayania can read it, along with the user's manuals for the parts I'm thinking of. And there." He takes a tablet out of his bag. Then he takes what looks a bit like a black tarp a small cylinder [looks like a battery] and something that looks like a thicker part of the same sort of metal skeleton zabna showed was inside his hand. "I'm going to need the last one back if at all possible. It's one of the motors I use for moving at my top speed."

"Do they need to be scaled up?"

"A couple of them need to be scaled up or down. I think I left detailed enough instructions for all of it on the tablet."

"She'll get to work on it."

"Alright, you can let me know if she has any questions."

"It'll be a few days before everything's ready."

"Alright, I very much appreciate you help. So, another question: how do people live in Ellayania's domain? How does that compare to those living in the domains of other Gods?"

"Gods vary in how much they get involved with their mortals. Most let whatever political structures people have stand. There's not really anything like that here, so Ellayania and I sort of mediate between communities."

"Alright, that wasn't quite what I was asking. Are they farmers? Do they have cities? How do their governments work when they have them? That sort of thing."

"Mostly small-town sorts of things here. Farmers, hunters, that sort of thing. This region of the world isn't heavily populated. There's one bigger city on the coast, that's where most of the imports come in. In more, uh, congenial places there tend to be more people and cities. Monarchies are fairly popular."

"Alright, that makes sense from what you've said of the technological level. Do gods tend to oppose technological progress?"

"Not as a rule, but they will if a specific thing offends them. Decay gods and refrigeration, for instance."

"That's a thing? There are gods of decay? Is that as unfriendly as it sounds?"

"Yeah, pretty much. Not all gods are nice; some get mortals to worship them through intimidation. That sort of thing used to be much more common, but there was a paradigm shift a few hundred years back and it's fallen out of fashion."

"It feels really uncouth to ask this but, can gods die?"

"It's not easy, but yes."

"So did it go out of fashion because the gods stopped intimidating people or because decay gods, and other similar gods, were killed?"

"It started with one nice god that got pretty big. A harvest god, nothing extraordinary but people liked it. Once that was prevalent enough, other gods had to change or they'd lose all their followers."

"Huh, that's surprisingly uplifting. Almost like a children's story. I assume the full series of events is more complex but it's good to hear."

"There was a bit of godly back-and-forth plus a whole other thing with competing mortal empires, but that gets a little complicated."

"So, do you know what most people die of on this world?"

"Mmm, mostly old age?"

"So there's enough gods with healing powers around that people generally don't die from illnesses?"

"More that gods limit the spread of the dangerous ones."

"Ah, I see. So on the medical front we can mostly help by improving your ability to deal with non-infectious diseases. That makes sense."

"Yeah."

"Has the existence of gods gotten you to understanding that living things are made of cells, or genetics for that matter?"

"No to genetics. We've seen cells, but they're basically an obscure curiousity."

"Ah, cells malfunctioning and replicating out of control is what causes cancer. Some other age-related illnesses happen when cells stop dividing enough to repair damage so it accumulates. Biology is a balancing act."

"I see."

"I could probably say more, but everything I know of biology is probably on the uplift tablet. It seems like your world might not have as much to gain as most do from industrialization. Of course, the near immortality of uploading will probably drive you to it industrialize to some extent regardless."

"I think we're actually pretty close to the beginnings of it on our own."

"Interesting, what signs have you seen?"

"The knowledge is out there, it's just scattered. It's a matter of putting it all together. Ellayania has collected most of the pieces, but she's not big enough to do distribution easily. If communication was easier, I bet it would already have happened."

"I think there are plans for a few types of radios on the uplift tablet. That should solve the communications problem."

"Yeah, plus all the other stuff that's there."

"It is kinda a lot."

"So how big a workspace will you need?"

"I think it depends a bit on which parts Ellayania is willing to do. I think I can build most of it myself with the right materials but there are a few bits of detail work that I can't do very easily. It occurs to me that I haven't asked how hard what I'm asking is. I can likely reuse my existing solar fabric if manufacturing more is difficult for her. Otherwise, as long as she keeps the rain away I just need a couple work tables and an area a little wider than the wing span in one direction and maybe half that in the other."

"It's more- tedious than hard. She has to concentrate. so that's why it's going to take a while."

"That's fascinating. If our magic systems are built on some common basis, which I'm starting to doubt, you have a very different set of abilities and limitations exposed. If they aren't built on a common basis I wonder why my diagnostic tools function. I can't think of a principled reason for two unrelated systems to be interoperable that way."

"Gods do translation. I wouldn't be surprised if your tools were interfacing with that bit."

"That's an interesting idea." He pulls out one of his little displays and fiddles with it. "This device is fully charged so at least some of the ambient magic it's detecting has to be my type; but this isn't exactly an magic intensive device, nothing I carry is. The antimagic is apparently compatible enough to keep Ellayania from speaking to me directly though." He shakes his head. "If all goes well, there'll be a research team here trying to puzzle out the answer soon enough."

"Are your devices covered by the antimagic?"

"Nope, they're not excepted from it, but they're designed in such a way that the antimagic just keeps them switched off rather than destroying them."

"So it makes sense that a god would be able to 'talk' with them even though they can't with you."

"Yes... but that leaves the question of why the antimagic works unanswered."

"Unless it feeds on magic or something I don't see why it wouldn't."

"So, I guess when I said if our magic systems are built on a common basis I had an implicit assumption that if they weren't built without a common basis that they wouldn't both be made of the same substance, call it mana for clarity's sake."

"It's a little bit strange to think of gods in that sort of terms."

"I guess it's a difference in perspective. I'm used to thinking of things from a reductionist point of view, where everything, including people and magic, is made from smaller pieces which can be analyzed individually. Maybe the gods here are an exception to that perspective, but I'm not going to assume that given that they would be the first exception."

"I bet that study will be exciting."

"It should be. I'm not sure precisely what methods they'll use, but when you're studying magic coming up with the experimental protocols is half the fun."

"Yeah. So, any ideas what you want to do while Ellayania is producing the materials?"

"I could take a tour of her domain if that's alright. Technically speaking that's one of my responsibilities, to meet a wide cross section of the society of a world."

"Sure. I can show you around."

Lots of little farming communities, some isolated hunters who prefer to be left alone, some towns that fish and make propitiations to Varkalosix, the nearby ocean goddess. One real city with a bustling harbor.

That's enough to occupy a few days probably.

And then when they finish up there's a dry field with the materials he requested.

He'll busy himself assembling them into a working plane. It'll take him most of a day. Then he'll be ready to go. "Any recommendations on where I should visit first?"

Pascale hands him a map of the continent with god domains marked on it. "Tisvetaia's nice, and not too far from here. She does preservation; you'll probably find that interesting."

"That does sound interesting." He busies himself with one last preflight check and smiles. "Thanks so much for your help. I'm sure we'll meet again some day."

"We'll look forward to it."