"...okay yeah that's actually pretty amazing."

"Yeah! And this isn't even me meddling to make it awesome, this is actually just what my world is like. I stole it and ran off cackling because I don't see why I shouldn't. Oh, and we went to space and then to the Moon, I should mention that those aren't mine either, that's actually just humanity doing cool human things."

"You can... go to the moon?"

"With really big rockets filled with extremely explosive rocket fuel to blast you at it really fast and really precisely, yeah! It's a place you can go. The universe is sort of like, hm... okay, imagine Earth—that being my world—as a little blue marble, drifting around in a sea of nothingness. The sun is another marble, this one much larger and significantly more on fire. It's also drifting around in this sea of nothingness, but close enough and big enough that you can see it from the little blue marble. The moon, the stars - same thing. Some mix of large enough or bright enough to see. Stars are actually other suns from very far away, they're just very very bright, so we can see them anyway."

"...huh. That makes the Dragons look way more powerful, though, if they can move stars just by being around."

"I'm not actually sure if it works the same way in Tyria. You might have weird world physics going on. If it is like Earth, the dragon might be warping light, not actual matter, so it could be like—like a Mesmer's illusions. Warping the way you see it, but maybe not warping the way it actually is. And also I can take them, so."

"Well, so can I."

Giggle.

"That's the spirit. Actually now that I think about it, I don't see a reason I shouldn't let you fight the dragons, and just keep them from breaking reality or killing anyone. Is it no fun if they can't kill anyone? I'd feel kind of bad if they did. They'd get resurrected, because when I save the world, I damn well save the world, but still."

"—breaking reality?"

"Oh yeah, that's a thing, kill too many of the dragons without a place to put their power, and reality starts breaking down. Or something. I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, but it can get messy. Whereas if I help it will just sort of conveniently not be messy."

"...you're a very convenient phenomenally powerful deity, you know?"

"I try! Also, not a deity, if I admit to being a deity of things that I write I'd be sort of... duty bound... to immediately go write fix fic for every single thing I've ever written, for complicated personal reasons. So. Yes, but also no."

"Hey, I'm not judging, I was half an atheist before you showed up."

Giggle.

"Tyria's gods are terrible, anyway, you're probably better off without them. Anyway. I think I got off topic, there."

"Maybe a little."

"Just a smidge," she agrees. "Okay, where was I? Explaining space? Right, uh. So everything is floating in an infinite sea of nothingness, and there is a lot of distance between things. More than you're imagining. So much distance that I'm not entirely convinced that anyone can actually, really wrap their head around how big it is. The Earth averages about 149 million kilometers away from the Sun. Or about eleven thousand times the diameter of the Earth, if you don't measure things in kilometers. Astrally speaking, the Earth is pretty close to the Sun. So that might start giving you an idea of the distances we're dealing with, here."

"...we do measure things using kilometres, yes."

"Oh, good, that's convenient. Do you need a minute?"

"No, thank you, a second was quite enough. Do go on."

She giggles.

"Okay. So Earth's not the center of the universe. It's actually not even the center of the solar system, that honor goes to the Sun. We're sort of in this tiny little pocket of things, drifting together in the really big sea of nothingness. Elsewhere, much further away than anything in our little tiny neighborhood, are other suns with their own solar systems. The closest star to ours is, uh..." She surreptitiously Googles Alpha Centauri's distance to the Sun. "Over forty million million kilometers. And that's about where my brain can't chew on numbers that big anymore, so. Yeah. The universe is pretty big."

"I think you probably lost me after the hundred and forty-nine million kilometres but other than that I'm following."

Aestrix giggles again. "I'm sorry, I'll tone it down a bit, I just really like talking about space. So Earth—my Earth—doesn't have magic. Any, at all, that I know of. It's terrible. So I decided that if I was going to steal Earth, I'd add magic, because." Pause. "... It's magic. Plus I needed a way to make the next part make sense. So. The magic's based around transfer of energy. Light, heat, radiation, radio waves—there's this whole spectrum. I decided to let magic users convert between the different energy types, and move them around. So, like, remove all of the light in a room, then go make a brilliant light somewhere else with the stolen light. That sort of thing."

"Sounds pretty neat. A bit less flexible than our magic, though, unless I'm missing something."

"Thanks! I think without technological assistance it's overall less flexible than your magic, but I added an unscientific energy type to the list, that being souls. ... Huh. I suppose for you that'd just sound normal. All right then, sorry for not including it earlier. So, rip off bits of souls or consume entire souls for ludicrous power, so forth. Rip off too much, and a person starts losing memories and forgetting who they are, and might experience large changes in personality. There are ways to be ethical about it, but it's not required, magically speaking. I have them as really efficient to convert from, but no one's yet managed to convert other types of energy into it."

"...huh. Interesting that souls can be—like that. I'm pretty sure ours can't."