[I have no idea. Is it supposed to run on something?]

[I guess it doesn't have to, I'm just used to it.]

In the morning Brian (with intermittent Isabella translation help) loads up Varan and his bagged space-alien clothes into the car to take him to the airport.

Cars are conceptually neat but underwhelming.

At the airport he is supposed to show people a note and go where he's pointed till he is on a plane.

He does this.

The airport is very cool. The plane is strange, but okay. Once it touches down he's extremely tired of sitting still but fortunately going and retrieving his luggage probably involves not sitting still. Not that he actually knows how to do that, but presumably.

His bag, which had to be checked because it's got a sword, is on the other side of the security checkpoint, so Isabella can meet him first. [Hi!] she says, waving and leaning on her cane.

[Hi!] He waves back.

[Your bag should be on the carousel over there,] point. [How was the flight?]

He looks at her like he thinks this is a kind of strange question.

[It went very high. We weren't attacked.]

[...'kay. Hungry? We can stop for dinner on the way to my apartment.]

[Sure, thank you.]

He retrieves his bag.

[What do you like to eat? New York City has some of the best restaurants in the world, lots of choices.]

Extremely bland porridge. This is not a useful thing to say, it's not the sort of thing you feed a guest the very first time you meet them. Softboiled eggs, if they're good. This is still not taking full advantage of his rich patron offering to treat him to a fancy restaurant.

[I couldn't guess what kinds of foods exist here but it might be nice to try something in a cream sauce?]

[Can do.] Onto the subway with them.

The subway is cooler than the airplane! He grins and looks around at everything on it.

[I'm guessing from your bag that Golarion is pretty low-tech.]

[Huh?]

[That there are fewer nonmagical inventions around there?]

[...Huh? Do you have... better backpacks?] He paid kind of a lot for a masterwork backpack and now he's embarrassed and defensive and worried that actually he got cheated.

[I think in a lot of ways the technology makes them cheaper more than it makes them better but like. The subway is not magical. The plane wasn't either.]

He just kind of boggles at this claim.

[Eclipsed do all of the magic in the world, there aren't that many of us, and we can't make anything stay magical, we have to be acting on a thing any time we don't want it to act nonmagically.]

Nod nod. [The airplane and subway and car were all... reasonable things for magic to do. They'd fit right in on a list with unseen servants and horses made of mist.]

[Well, they're not magic. I can explain some of how they work but not all of it, I'm not an engineer.]