Yep. That is in fact hilarious, Mortal will be found giggling at it very often.

"What in particular is amusing you?"

"Right now it's the fifteenth time a 'mortal vassal' escapes their master, to everyone's surprise and chagrin."

Snort.

"It's also funny how stairs as a solution to the problem of having more than one floor seem to completely fail to occur to the author."

"It's not intuitive! Any time we want to traverse vertical space without flying we don't have enough room for stairs and use ladders!"

"We've incorporated stairs pretty neatly into architecture, too, some are even really famous." He shows her some pictures of pretty stairs to demonstrate. "I guess you couldn't have imagined lifts, though."

"Those have a smaller footprint than stairs and could have made sense in the same way ladders do, but yeah."

"Flying is probably way more fun, though."

"Yep."

"Have you gotten to science fiction, yet?"

"Which ones are those?"

"...you know, I don't have any principled way to explain the difference, er, it's the ones without magic but with very advanced tech even beyond what we have. Is—the ones with artificial intelligences or that have colonised other planets," he says, cutting himself from saying Isaac Asimov's name.

"I read a robots one, is robots science fiction?"

"I guess it depends on what the robots do?"

"They talked about philosophy. It was strange."

"The robots did?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah, definitely sci fi, then, robots cannot talk. Yet."

"Okay. Then, yes, I have read some."

"Sci fi tends to be pretty transhumanistic in purview. When it's not dystopian."

"Why the extremes?"

"I'm not sure they're really extremes—when we imagine our future capabilities, even the least of evils can become pretty terrible."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, like, humans have this thing where we kinda—do things. Often without thinking about their consequences. And science fiction is typically about what we would do if such-and-such were true, or after so much time had passed, or both. There's this one fictional series I like which I included there, the Vorkosigan Saga, that I think has very good worldbuilding in that direction."