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..."

"I mean, switch/switch relationships tend to wind up acting like equals sort of as an average... I'm just not sure what kinky nondynamic people, you know, do. Not that I'm judging, I mean, my brother's nondynamic... buuuut he's asexual too so the answer is 'nothing, he does nothing'."

"It's not kinky. And I'm very unsure how much detail you want me to go into here."

"Feel free not to, I'm just expressing my bewilderment. But it's suuuuper kinky in my own idiom."

"Eh. There's kissing, the obvious-to-me escalations from there... You tell each other to do something, sometimes, but the meaning is more like a suggestion than an order. 'I think you should...' 'Nah, how about this instead...' 'I want you to...' 'Sure but my turn next...'. That sort of thing."

"Wow, that sounds like kind of an enormous hassle. Then again I don't really know how subs tick either, I guess I could file it under that."

"It is a bit of a hassle, imagining myself as a dom, but it is how it is. Ideally you're sufficiently invested in making the other person happy to take their suggestions, or you know them well enough to suggest appropriate things."

"I mean, we have versions of that. It's just not all... timid."

He shrugs. "Unless one of us wants a practical demonstration I think we'll have to keep having trouble picturing the other's thing. I want to talk about magic. One gets magic, is the mechanism for getting it known?"

"Mechanism, not as such, circumstances, yes. Total lunar eclipse - anywhere in the world - closest to your twelfth birthday, you maybe get magic. One kind or the other, not both. And then you can't control it and everybody starves their kids for a couple days leading up to the relevant eclipse because that helps keep it limited and non-fatal, and precogs catch the most dramatic accidents. If you don't want to go anywhere with your magic, you get locked down by a psion who learned to do that and then your magic can't do anything and you lead a normal life, unless you get unlocked later. If you want to be a mage or a psion, you go to virtuality, also run by psions - mages have all kinds of career options too but they aren't involved in any of the critical infrastructure steps here. We hang out in a simulated setting that manages via psionic trickery to convince our magic - either sort - that that's where the world is, so we can't mindwipe anybody or nuke a city block or whatever flailing around. Takes two years, average, to get out of virtuality, if you do - some people drop out and get locked down instead. Every now and then they starve us a couple days, wake us up, get us some exercise. And when a psion deems us not a danger out we pop, usually with a small trick or two - I learned to talk to my twin, in virtuality, and lucid dreaming, lots of psions pick up lucid dreaming because it's easy. And we start working on whatever else interests us in earnest."

"Yeah, before that you'd wander around in the wilderness not eating very much for a couple years, it sucked. People differ on whether you're 'born with' magic or not, but it doesn't seem to run in families at all, it looks really statistically random."

"There's no trend by sex or role either in my world. Why's there so much sex-linked magic?"

"Nobody knows. We have stereotypes of behavior and style and psychology based on sex rather than role, since we don't do roles. One common theory is that magic likes thematically fitting things, certain kinds of magic fit 'female' and don't fit 'male' so that's how it gets stuck. But the data doesn't support it in my opinion."

"I mean, we have gender, as a thing, but if you're loading all the role baggage onto it too, wow, talk about concepts straining under their load. Even back when practically everybody instead of fringe fundamentalists thought that subs were girls and doms were guys they were still separate ideas."

"Women tending to be subby used to be a thing for us, too, though we didn't call it that. Sub-and-dom and the baggage thereof is just not a thing. I suspect if your world had wizardry it would tend to go to doms because wizardry tends to thematically imply commanding the world to behave and witchcraft tends to imply working with it or convincing it. These things are mysterious and more the purview of a Philosophy of Dimensionality major than a Gen Thaumo one."

"Fair enough. The stereotypes reflect what seems to be an actual statistical imbalance, but it's only sixty-thirty, extras are switches."

"I'm curious to see if you can operate, or learn to operate, psionically powered interfaces. They're ostensibly very easy for anyone with mental abilities to use, but I wouldn't know because I can only pretend to be psionic using a different interface."

"Well, I could learn to operate psionic tech of the sort we have back home but I don't know about your stuff."

"Any objection to trying it?"

"The fact that it takes years to learn to do anything?"

"They're supposed to be unnervingly easy to use for anyone with the right general kind of magic. I'm curious whether that holds and you can pick it up in thirty seconds, or not."

"Oh, in that case I'll try it, that'd be cool."

"Why were you just carrying these around?" she wonders, peering at them.

"I'm tech support, and I was heading to work on something when Milliways found me. And besides, good techs always carry around any tools they might need. Big waste of time to get somewhere, start working on the problem, and then have to take half an hour to run to the store for phase crystals or something."

"Okay. So... what do I do? The only magic I already know that operates outside myself is talking to my brother and it's not my brother."

"The best way I've heard it described is 'want at it, but magically'. If it's getting anything at all the crystal will change color, if it's getting anything useful the metal will react." He hands off the thing and watches curiously.

"I'm not sure how I would have done that if all I'd picked up were internal magic," she says. "I was pretending I'd generalized the talking to my brother thing. I guess if I'd been working from lucid dreaming I could've pretended this was a dream, but I don't see an avenue if all I had were the groundwork for eidetic memory."

"I wonder if you'd benefit from a little Clarity."

"A little what?"

"One of our magical currencies. MTU's fiat currency can't be backed against something physical, the arbitrage would just get ridiculous. So we have magical currency. Clarity is analogous to gaining or losing some mental horsepower for about a week, depending on whether you mint or redeem it. It's one of the more expensive ones."

"I mean, I assume it'd help me learn things faster, if I had any, but it sounds like I'd lose it again on the downswing and I'm not made of money, let alone magically-backed currency."

"Point. There are things you can sell - Physical capability, luck, emotion, I could scan you for ability to mint mana but I doubt you can."

"I don't really have a ton of physical capability to invest," she says dryly. "And how the heck does luck or emotion work? Or mana?"

"It's all temporary, except AP which is just permanent version of mana. Mana's generalized magical fuel for all magical traditions that run on a finite resource. Luck makes minor things like being late for the bus more or less likely, depending. Emotion dulls your feelings a small amount until it's paid off. Positive ones count for more."

"What do you get back if you turn in one of the emotion ones?"

"Magical anesthesia. It originally gave you emotions but this caused... Addiction and liability issues. So they spent a decade working over the system entirely."

"Huh. I bet there's overhead there. Why are positive emotions worth more, if you're not getting out what you put in?"

"Giving up positive emotion is a bigger sacrifice. The system these are mostly built on cares a lot about, fairness, for lack of a better word."

"...Metaphysically, or, like, economically?"

"Some of both? Market prices respond to supply, and cheating gets less effective over time. You can game the system a little, but it self-corrects after a while. Fairly sure that's designed in. MTU would be in trouble if one of them ran away in value from the others too much."

"But if they all produce anaesthesia, by what mechanism would a minting from a negative emotion be less useful at that than one from a positive emotion?"

"I'm not an expert on the underlying mechanisms, but... The gist is that negative emotions are overall more chaotic and thus harder to extract negentropy from. The anesthesia is almost an entirely separate thing, rolled into the emotions for now because minting pain isn't ready."

"It seems like that's going to wind up about as gameable as using shells for money, masochists exist."

"Which I suspect is part of why the suits are delaying it as much as they possibly can."

"Ha. I mean, inflation's not inherently evil but you do wanna be able to control it."

"Yeah, I am very much not an economancer. Sorry, economist, that was sarcasm. Some people who know what they're doing are in charge of that. Hopefully."

"I wish them luck. If everybody else is kinked funny I bet it turns my world into an economic powerhouse no matter what controls they put on it, at least whenever we get linked up, what's the waiting list on that like?"

"That depends on a lot of things. Population, general stability, and useful local resources chief among them. How does your unusual standard relationship dynamics make you an economic powerhouse, exactly?"

"Supply of masochists? I dunno, maybe you've got plenty, but it's much more often a sub thing than a dom thing, so if you don't have any subs..."

"If minting pain ever does become a thing, they'll probably tune pain down really hard and people stop minting emotion much, if a supply of masochists becomes problematic. And the connected worlds are a big, big market. What's your planet's population? Any active wars? Frequency of natural disasters?"

"Six billion about, perpetual conflict in the Middle East and other local clashes but nothing major globally, they usually don't go all the way through the alphabet naming a year's hurricanes?"

"Solidly above average population for a single planet. It is just one planet, right? What sounds like good stability outside of a few pockets, a ready market for weather control, intriguing but not immediately blatantly exploitable local magic. I think you'd get placed... Priority three, maybe priority two. Which would be maybe ten to twenty years and two to five, respectively."

"Yeah, just one planet so far. People've been to the moon though."

"Your tech sounds fairly advanced compared to the universe at large if virtualization is a thing. Tech exchange between connected worlds seems to move a little slowly. Importing tech and teachers is expensive. So being well-established with it on your own and having a strong economy to buy imports will help."

"There was a huge push to develop virtualization once we noticed it was possible for a psion to handle one or a small group in a similar way manually - as long as the psion doesn't need to sleep, which is doable, and can do shared dreams and some other moderately invasive stuff. Because almost nobody wanted to starve in the wilderness for two years but having a supply of magic people is really important - mostly psions, because if we run out of trained psions we won't be able to lock down new or criminal eclipsed. So now the population of magic people is booming and it's really exciting."

"Should I arrange for someone to discover your world in few years, connect you to MTU-and-related-companies' sphere of influence?"

"Any secret catches?"

"Not from me. MTU can lean exploitative on worlds that are easy to exploit, but yours has psions and mages. There are other companies that will probably follow suit after MTU starts integrating, and I don't know as much about them, but it seems to work out well almost all of the time. MTU doesn't stage coups on local governments, there is a multiversal code of human rights, and so on."

"What's the multiversal code of human rights?"

"That sounds... like it was developed in many stages."

"Somewhat, yes. Humans aren't the only sentient species, and it's really hard to get so many disparate societies, different psychologies, to agree on something like this. There's a bit of a ruckus to reform it once in a while."

"Well, wait, why wouldn't you just separate the declaration of human rights from the declaration of other rights then?"

"Because then everyone starts yelling about anthrocentrism and speciesism."

"Then why isn't it a declaration of personal rights?"

"Um. Oops. I called it a set of human rights again, how anthrocentric of me. No, it's meant to apply to all persons, and gets a bit overloaded with how many different kinds of people there are out there."

"Gotcha."

"So, arrange for MTU to find your world, or not? I've offered it to everyone I've met here so far but only one person actually took me up on it."

"I mean, are there reasons not to? What exactly makes a world exploitable, are we talking natural resources and primitive natives or, you know, highly magically potentiated twelve-year-olds who sometimes kill their entire families and everybody would believe it if it looked like they'd gotten killed in the process too but instead they were kidnapped?"

"Mostly primitive natives. Some natural resources. Unstable magical twelve-year-olds are likely just as hazardous to us as to you. It'd be tricky and expensive and risky and illegal, so nobody would put their career on the line organizing such a scheme."

"Okay. Any other pitfalls? I don't object to making this decision on behalf of my world or anything but I want all the information."

"How are the more principled organizations a problem, do they end-run around local governance to empty badly run prisons or something?"

"Things like that happen occasionally, yes. Or people who think socialist economies are inherently evil and try to destroy them. Or religious extremists. The Purity advocates for genocide of nonhumans."

"We don't have any of those ourselves unless they count, like, animals, or mage shapeshifting."

"Then the Purity in particular won't be interested except possibly to find recruits."

"Okay. So we're in a solid position to contribute to and benefit from the multiversal economy, which like the normal economy is made of people, but can I assume it's on a solid upward trajectory long term? Stuff getting invented, stuff getting built faster than it's destroyed..."

"Yeah, long term upward trajectory. The rule of thumb is an average 3% growth per year plus or minus 8% percent for any individual year, I think."

"Okay, I think I would like us to be joined up."

"Sounds like fun."