"Hello," says a girl Milan happens to sit near. "Who're you?"

"Milan Kosorin."

"Constanza Hirsch. Kosorin, is that Italian?"

"He's from another world entirely, haven't you heard?"

"Huh. No I had not. How'd that happen?"

"His world has a different kind of magic and he ended up here by accident."

"Kosorin is a Laefarrin name," he contributes. "Laefair is the country where I was born."

"What's it like there?" she asks with genuine interest.

"Well, the first thing everybody comments on is that the king's a..." He glances at Odette. "There's not a Genoshan word for lich, is there."

"No, there is not a word for that thing. There was not an idea for that thing."

"How about - well, technically I could just calque it and say 'undead'...?"

"I think most people aren't dead," someone says, puzzled.

"The word he was looking for with 'undead' is revenant, actually, we just don't have any stories about revenants that are like how liches apparently are. I think. I got the vague concept but not, like, detail."

"'Undead' refers to a category of people and animals who died, and didn't quite come all the way back to life, but who are functionally alive enough to move around and do things. Liches are a specific subcategory, a person who used magic to preserve their own mind and body after death. They have a nasty reputation and it's mostly deserved but King Eisar in particular is an excellent king and I wholeheartedly approve of him."

"Huh," someone says.

"Why wouldn't he just not die, if he's so magic?" the guy who knew Milan was from another world wondered.

"Maybe it was a contingency in case of accident or violence?" the first one suggests.

"I haven't asked what his particular story was, but a lot of liches do it because they're about to die of old age anyway. Old age is a fairly intractable problem in my world; you can't even be resurrected from it like you can from most kinds of accidental or violent death."

"...If you're really magic why would you die of old age?"

"Magic there does not work like magic here."

"Yeah, no kidding, guys, he just said resurrection, did you miss that?"

"You don't have it? No resurrection, no magic items... I have a lot of work ahead of me, don't I."

Everyone wants to hear about his magic system now.

"I would've died if I tried to study thaumatology," he explains yet again, "but I know the very basics of what magic can do, even if I don't know how or why. Magic can bring back the dead, but not if they died of old age. Magic can heal - 'healing' is a fundamental concept or process to it - but, again, not old age or its effects. Magic can pretty easily create self-sustaining magical objects, which can do all kinds of neat things, the minute I figure out how I'm going to reinvent the ethernet."

There is a lot of hubbub and discussion of magical theory and somebody would like to know what the ethernet is, please.

...Milan will have a go at explaining the ethernet!

"So first of all, a crystal ball is a scrying tool. You look at it and images form inside it representing the thing you wish to observe. So somebody had the bright idea of using them for art - creating images with no external reference point - and then somebody else figured out how to give those generated images enough permanence that you could use one crystal ball to examine things created with a different one. Now the ethernet is a vast sprawling library of imaginary pages. People have done amazing things with it - you can use it to communicate near-instantly with anyone else who has a crystal ball, and read anything anyone has ever put on a public ethersite."

This is incredibly nifty and several people start debating how to do this or something similar with their kind of magic.

Milan is utterly delighted to participate in this conversation!

The consensus seems to be that enchanting is probably necessary, which introduces accessibility issues