"Sure. They're just not very... impressive about it. Or as dependent on it."

"I'm not sure what in particular you're talking about. - How's 'Earthling'?" he asks, dropping the pretentious scientific term in favor of slapping an Etra La suffix on its name for the planet they're approaching.

"Fine for people who are actually from Earth, I guess?"

"I mean, I'm presuming you evolved there even if you weren't personally born there."

" - wait, I missed something, why are we presuming this?"

"I'm extrapolating, I suppose it's possible that in this universe Earth is actually a soundstage someone rigged up on which to film hoax movies, but it looks like I expect it to look and has humans who speak languages I know and such."

"...where are you from? If that's not super rude to ask."

"Over there." He points at the upper left corner of the continent they're now approaching. (He frivolously pivoted his craft to have north look up.)

"Oh," she says, as if this actually explains anything. Maybe it would explain anything if she knew more things.

"On, you know, a different Earth that's in a different calendar year and not ruled by Carthons, but that spot on that Earth."

"That makes... both more and less sense."

"Yes, a bit. I'm perhaps not as confused as you are but I'm pretty confused."

"Hm. I guess maybe it's a layered world thing, like when people go to the the realm of the dead or the plane of shadows or something, and they're in the same place but on a different level of it. But, like, also with time travel. I guess."

"Are the realm of the dead and plane of shadows legit phenomena people interact with here, or an analogy?"

" - well they're not real? But time travel and summoning indestructible Li- humans who can magically make planes out of thin air are not really supposed to be real things either, so I feel like I'm not super confident in my assessment of which lies connect to reality in which ways right now."

"You could call me a demon," he says. "Anyway, yes, I seem to be from an alternate universe and I don't know exactly how much I can assume holds based on what I know from there beyond the things that obviously don't, but 'humans evolved on Earth' definitely seems like one of the safer guesses."

"That sounds super fake, but I guess a lot of things that are demonstrably happening right now seem pretty fake, so."

"Why's it sound fake - don't believe in evolution, have another planet of origin in mind, mythology about originating in a plane of shadow -?"

"The Alteri made us. Probably. I think."

"I find that unlikely but this is an alternate universe, so before I confidently contradict you how about I check, about how long ago is this meant to have happened."

"Seventy thousand years ago. Give or take maybe a few thousand, I don't remember precisely. Usually, anyway."

"Wow, okay. So if we assume a generation length of twenty years, that'd be..." He does some fiddling on his computer. "Thirty-five hundred generations ago. Going up the maternal line, your thirty-five-hundred-generations-ago grandma was thus -" He conjures a tiny model of her in her surroundings, plasticized so as not to have the floppy horrible quality of miniature humans.

"Huh." She stares thoughtfully at the tiny naked plastic human and her tiny plastic section of scrubland. "How do you know?"

"How do I -? Oh, uh, I can make things based on my imagination, but most of the time I'm copying from something that actually existed; I just have to have in mind whatever it is I want to copy and then the magic takes care of making an accurate replica. In this case I have replaced all the water in this ancestor of yours with plastic because if you don't do that you get sorta creepy dead mini humans, but other than that the copy should be accurate to what I was aiming at."

"Huh." Back to staring at the tiny human. "I don't think that proves that we evolved on Earth, even accepting all of those premises, but it's not what I'd expect the earliest Li - humans? The earliest humans to look like. So that's something."