It's a teenage girl with a cane and short hair. She is confused.

She doesn't react to his shielding. She taps in. "Interdimensional bar. Uh, give me the standard explanation if there is one."

"Standard as it is: The door to Milliways replaces doors at whim from your world and everyone else's worlds. Humans are most common, 'Earth' seems fairly common too. Time there is paused while you're here, usually, there's a translation aura, the bar is sentient and female and serves anything you care to name so long as it's not dangerous or magic, and the first drink's free."

"I'm speaking English. It's common in the set of connected worlds I know. Lots of worlds speak it already, even before we first contact them. A sort of multiversal standard, and one of the great mysteries of world theory."

"You know a set of connected worlds?"

"Yes. I work tech support for the principle provider of transit between them, even. Multiversal Thaumics Unlimited, senior tech support, Communication and Transport divisions, at your service. D'you have any magic? Personally, I find magic the most fascinating part of a new world."

"Yeah, I'm a psion. Yours must work differently or you wouldn't be in communication and transport."

"Much of it is using magical tools on other magical tools. You don't need to know how to make concrete to be a construction worker. You do need to have almost a decade of thaumaturgy education to get up to anything useful with dynamically targeted transfer functions. Psion, eh? D'you mind testing my shields? I designed them myself, they use elements of our brand of psionics, elementalism, vegamancy, and glamour. I rarely get a chance to throw something completely new at them."

"I'm not that kinda psion. And I'm sixteen, even that kinda psion at my age would barely be able to poke you. What's vegamancy?"

"Aha. Vegamancy is... Automating divination, broadly speaking."

"You likely to export that to my world in the next twenty years?"

"I'm trying not to make official contact with anyone unless they really seriously need it, it's a huge headache, and I have enough work already, and MTU's contact teams have decades of backlog."

"My career's saved."

"Aha. Vegamancy on any significant scale is very expensive, and being precognitive yourself is supposed to be a massive help in learning it. Your versions of psions can do precognition? More varied than the word led me to believe. Now I'm curious what else you can do."

"Psions do all the things that don't physically affect things other than brains and psionic tech, and mages do all the things that do. I can talk to my twin brother - although not from here, seems like - and I'm working on eidetic memory and then I'm going to pick up precog to pay the bills while I learn more. My sub's a mage and she can shapeshift genders and a few other minor things and some self-healing; she's working on healing in general with a view to eventual immortality."

"Fully general, but you have to learn it. Interesting. What's a sub, some sort of assistant?"

"Uh, if that's what you do with your assistants, but sounds like a sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen to me."

"...This is a bar between worlds. Cultural differences have struck again. I offended someone by attempting to shake their hand, earlier. I have never heard of a sub outside of likely irrelevant technical vocabulary."

"She's my sub, I'm her dom? There's kissing? She kneels next to me at mealtimes and I feed her if the food's more like toast and less like clam chowder?"

He suddenly looks mildly uncomfortable. "Dom-sub is the normal state- The sort of relationship you're describing ranges from from 'uncommon, vaguely taboo' to 'persecuted against or banned' on worlds I've lived on. In two different ways actually, that you're both women and the fact that one of you is submissive to the other."

"She shapeshifts, I just saw her as a girl last. And she's a switch, actually, not a total sub, but I'm all dom, so. Um, how do you persecute or ban romance in general, or are you just saying everybody else is really really kinky...? Wait, do you not even have a role? I wasn't sure how to read you but I assumed you had one..."