He holds out a hand.

Milan shrugs and takes it.

And the muffled crack sound repeats and they are in a richly appointed office with several comfortable chairs. Atennesi lets go of Milan's hand and sits in one of them. "It seems that your world is very different from this one on a fundamental level."

"Yes, it does seem that way," he agrees, taking a spare chair.

"You say that hubris is punished; could you expand on that?"

"If you try to claim you're better than the gods, a god might notice, and then you have a problem. If you walk around thinking the universe should function in a way that's more to your liking, the universe might decide to take offense, and then you have a problem. If you annoy someone or something who is considerably more powerful than you are, in general, you will have a problem."

"For the most part, that seems relatively straightforward," he admits. "If mages were worse at self-policing we might have a similar problem. But I'm not sure what you mean by the universe taking offense. The most obvious meaning would be that you had a much sharper magic-to-pain curve than we, but we've established that you don't recognize magic as we know it."

"It's common to attribute motivations to the universe, because if you do things that annoy it, it reacts as though annoyed. For example, the universe is shy, so if you try to do rigorous experiments to figure out its underlying rules, it arranges for whatever you think you're discovering to blow up in your face, often literally."

This seems to genuinely shock him. "You can't do experiments?"

"We can, technically, it's just highly inadvisable."

"How do you get anything done?"

"We manage."

"I'm impressed."

"Thank you. I'm, frankly, skeptical."

"Would you like some form of evidence?"

"Such as?"

He shrugs. "I could perform a series of trivial experiments here and now. I could show you one of the science classes being taught at our university this moment."

"...I'm tempted to ask for the experiments, despite the danger."

"It would be trivial. I believe the simplest one to achieve with the materials on hand would be the one which confirms that objects fall at the same speed regardless of weight."

"I think I heard about someone trying to answer that question once. There's now a part of the world where down has permanently ceased to apply."

"Curious. If it had that affect here, I wonder if it would apply to Genosha or to the ocean."

"Hmm?"

"Ah. Genosha is a flying city. The reason I can get away with being in charge of a city, despite the bans on Great Mages interfering in politics, is that I created it rather than taking over an existing territory."

"What a delightful solution."

He grins. "I'm pleased that you think so. My peers weren't thrilled that I had found a loophole in their ordinances."