"Shara. Sharabel Swanpennon." Handshake.

"I fell out of the sky. I was investigating something bizarre in my own world and I think I tripped."

Syl winces. "Oh dear. I'd been chasing down a gremlin when I fell down a chimney, and the chimney led... very far away, as it turned out. And so I fell out of the sky. As well. Are you also going to want to go home?"

"Ideally. I mean, it seems like it might be really productive to have some kind of stable transit between worlds for trade and so on, but I haven't seen anything here that overrides my desire to live at home and reassure my loved ones if I do have to pick one place to stay full-time."

"Well, if we can get you there once we can likely get you back and forth again, even if it's only on Calibration, or something. Which is still easily enough to trade some things - what kind of resources does your world have?"

"Ravelers. Um, I'm not sure we'll have anything else unique. What is Calibration?"

"I'll trade you definitions, then! Calibration's the day when the walls between worlds get thinner, and it's easier to summon and banish and that sort of thing. Very useful for testing out magic. What's a raveler?"

"A small percentage of people, in our teens, get 'options' - a shortlist of the possible magical specialties we can choose. Raveling takes energy to do, sort of like going on a hike or playing chess might, but it takes it all at once, not over a long period. I'm a metaraveler; with very little energy expenditure I automatically see and understand magic around me - 'understand' is less automatic than 'see', I don't have much practice with local kinds yet - and I can also edit or destroy it, although this is more expensive for me than it is for whoever made it in the first place."

"Hm. Fascinating! Depending on what the other ravelers do you might find demand for them here, but it'd have to be a long-term thing if we couldn't set up a permanent gate... That's a question for another day, though. Are you hungry? I know Aril is."

"Not very, but I could eat."

With a gesture, Syl is abruptly surrounded by dozens of pots made out of golden light. She begins pulling various ingredients out of thin air and turning them into presumably delicious food, all at an obviously inhuman rate.

"Well, that's her gone."

"...What?"

"What exactly are charms? I mean, I can see them, but a verbal explanation will be faster than waiting for me to be able to disentangle their effects by looking."

"They're... well, as Exalted we've got the power of the Unconquered Sun, as I mentioned. Charms are a way of exerting that power on the world around us and overruling the laws of nature. They can do practically anything. I tend to use them for things like dancing so beautifully that grown men weep, or decimating armies; Syl uses them for stuff like making enchanted swords for a thousand men in a day, or cooking things very quickly."

"...How versatile. And Exalted are...?"

"How does one get imbued?"

"Mmm... acts of great heroism, for Solars, and in particular committing such heroic acts shortly after another Solar kicks the bucket, since her divine spark will still be floating around ready to imbue you. Believe that for Lunars it's an act of impossible survival, and for the rest who the hell knows? Probably for Sidereals it's whoever's already fated to Exalt, that's sort of how they operate. Why d'you ask?"

"Just curious. I was actually on a quest to acquire adventure-based approval when the portal thing ate me."

"Huh! Would you like to tag along on a few of Syl's and my quests? We do rather a lot of glorious adventure, and all. Hard work, but it's nothing if not heroic. And I'll bet you she'd make you a million little magic widgets if you came along, she loves gifting people."

"I would love magic widgets, and it's entirely possible that your quests could serve the purpose I was after with my own too."