Margaret usually walks home from school. She usually goes down this street. She usually goes past this pet store, even.
There isn't usually a sparkling hole in the sidewalk, opening up under her feet and dropping her into glittering confusion.
Now she's somewhere completely unfamiliar.
The students accept this and move on.
There are a lot more students in the halls closer to the Planar Studies department. None of them take much notice of her.
She takes plenty of notice of them--their clothes, their general level of health, the apparent tech level and magicalness level of their accessories--but keeps moving and doesn't stare too openly or try to interact.
All of them are extremely healthy. Actually, none of the people she passed in the street looked like you would expect if "textbook" had won the fight with "Ren Faire" in terms of population health levels.
The clothes have consistent styles, mostly, although there are clothes she might be able to pick out as foreign. Most of their accessories display neither tech nor magic but there is the occasional color-changing scarf or floating bauble.
Looks like dying of horrifying alien plague is a no and inventing the printing press and learning magic are both yes, so that's good. And if she followed the directions correctly, which she's pretty sure she did, the door to the planar studies department should be . . . this one. Knock knock.
The door opens and a tall, thin woman peers down at her and says something in the local language.
"I don't speak the local language; can you translate?" This time she's going to watch really carefully and find out exactly what gesture and nonsense word goes with translation.
Erfari ex, erfari ex, remember that . . . "I'm Margaret, I think I'm from another plane of reality, the admissions person said I should talk to you?" She really should have gotten that person's name but too late.
The room is absolutely filled with impenetrably-purposed doohickeys and bookshelves and books and stacks of paper. What bits of wall aren't obscured by bookshelves are plastered with pieces of paper with what look like maybe equations or something on them in a completely unfamiliar notation.
The woman who answered the door says "Achari echva!" and then beams. "Yes, it looks like that's correct! How did there come to be humans native to your plane?"
Oh wow. So much to learn, and all in this one room.
"If I say 'we evolved there from other animals', does that answer your question or do you need more detail?"
"Okay, so on my home plane children resemble their parents--you have children and parents here, right?--except sometimes with random changes, and that means . . . "
Unless she gets interrupted, she continues in this vein for about a minute, until she's given a basic explanation of evolution.
"Okay, that makes sense. I have no idea if sapient races here developed like that...how do you know that's how you got there, did you just figure this out and extrapolate that you must have? What other races are around?"
"There are a bunch of different lines of evidence--creatures with really short generations that you can watch evolving in real time, and sometimes we find preserved remains of ancient species that look like what we'd expect for the common ancestor of some group, things like that. Humans are the only species with language, but there are apes--close relatives of humans--with something like societies, and some aquatic animals called dolphins are pretty smart."
"Apes don't seem like strong evidence that sapient races in particular evolved," she says doubtfully.
"I couldn't begin to guess how it works here, but back home apes and humans are very similar biologically, in ways that suggest they're close cousins. Wait, when you say sapient races, do you just mean different kinds of human or do you actually have multiple sapient species?"
"Nope. Just humans and animals, if you draw the line between people and animals at whether they have language."
"...Huh. Anyway, isn't it just as likely that humans and apes both showed up from here? Apes are kind of similar to humans, I guess, but elves and orcs and dwarves and halflings and gnomes and so on are much closer."
"Maybe? There's a thing some people at home can do where they can look at the chemicals inside a creature that cause that creature to be shaped the way it is, and more closely related creatures have more similar chemicals. I don't know how to do it, but if we ever find my world someone can check and see if humans are fundamentally more like orcs than like apes. But I don't think humans and apes can both have showed up from here, because we have remains from millions of years ago when humans looked really different. So if humans and apes there came from here, it would have been so long ago that they were all still one species, and they would have had to diverge into humans and apes there the same as here. But if humans showed up on two planes completely separately, that's weird too. And we have fictional stories about species the magic is translating as elves and orcs and dwarves and halflings, so that's weird again."
"...Huh. I don't think past-scrying goes back millions of years. How do you know how old the remains are? How do you know they're human?"
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
