"It's magic. Magic is real, I told you. I can fly too, once I'm not-sick enough to make a whole hand glow."

"… Okaaaay, and is there any way for me to get this–" nonexistent– "magic?"

"You gotta be a girl, and get lucky. You don't believe me."

"I mean, I'm a girl, unless you mean I have to be younger too?"

And yeah, she doesn't really believe you.

"Only some girls get it. You start getting magic when you're eleven. If you come back tomorrow I can fly and then you have to believe me."

"If you can fly, yeah, I'll probably believe you."

"I think I'm out of magic. I was flying away from the monsters and then I got hurt and then I was here. I think it'll come back. I want to go home."

"I mean, if you came from another world with magic… I'm pretty sure we don't have magic here, so I'm not sure how you'll– be able to."

Head meets pillow frustratedly. "I'll try anyway."

She shrugs. "I'll try to help if there's anything I can do?"

"Don't know what makes magic, except that being hurt and sick makes it worse. The doc-tors are helping for that... They were mad that I can't read much though. It's not like I got to go to school."

"… Uh, right, yeah, most people go to school here. We have a good education system and– things. Most people are able to read."

"We were a serf family. Farming all day for Lord Rothamdar. Most people were before the monsters."

"Ah," she says. "Um, well, we have technology and stuff to help with things like that."

"Dunno word. Things like the phone?"

"Yeah. Electricity, mechanical stuff, better tools and things?"

"Oh. We have a little of that kind of thing. Everyone got scared of the monsters, so the church stopped burning scientists and started paying them."

"Yeah. The church stopped burning scientists here, a long while back."

"Good. The threshing thingy Julius Kralus invented made harvest so much easier, I can't even think about hundreds of years of that."

"I don't actually know anything about, uh, threshing?" she says. "But yeah, there's quite a lot of technology now."

"What kind of things? Phones? The lights in here?"

"And cars – a mode of transport – and computers – devices that can calculate lots of things and show them in lots of ways, the phone is a small one of them – and the internet – linking up a bunch of computers to send information across the planet. And various other things. I think."

"Um... I don't think I understand much of this."

She shrugs. "There are lots of things, basically. Uh, I'm not sure what's going to happen to you. Seeing as… you might not have any family here."

"If I can't go back to mom and Errie and I don't have to farm onions again I don't care."