"Ask away, I'm happy to explain whatever."

"Explain 'evolution'? I'm getting weird feedback from the translation spell."

"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?"

"...Do...you...not?"

"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?"

"They're human because they look a lot more like humans than anything else, and there are ways you can tell how long something has been in the ground--kinds of decay that go at really steady rates. Can you tell me more about Elves and Dwarves and Orcs? I want to know if they're like the stories we have or if the translation is just grabbing their names."

"Elves have a slightly different distribution curve on various facial features, longer, pointed ears, and age at a rate approximately one-third of humans. Dwarves are shorter, wider, in general hardier, and age at a rate approximately three-fourths human. Orcs have significantly different facial features, including extremely large canines, are on average taller, and age at approximately eleven-tenths the rate of humans. All three have ranges of skin tone that overlap with humans but include tones that humans lack."

"Huh. That mostly matches the stories; maybe people have gone back and forth between our worlds before. Another thing I don't think I've mentioned--my plane doesn't have any magic. Can you tell me more about how magic works here?"

"...Well, which kind?"

"I didn't know there were kinds. Start with the simplest one? Or your favorite."

"Well, I'm an arcane caster--some people do more than one kind, but most people who do any stick to one. The other kinds are divine and natural."

"What are the differences? 'Divine' is translating as being--about a kind of very powerful person?"

"Yes, divine magic is granted by the gods. Once you have any you have to build tiers like the other kinds, though."

Oh boy, gods that actually do stuff maybe, that's a bit unnerving, ask about something else. "Build tiers? What is that, is it how you get better at magic?"

"It's not how you gain a better understanding of magic, but it's how you gain access to greater amounts of magic."

"It drains some kind of resource? Is getting more like building up a muscle by exercising it, or is there something else you have to do?"

"It's more like...adding layers to an icicle. Or a stalactite. If those came in discrete stages. And it doesn't so much drain a resource as fill a capacity."

"How do you get any of the other kinds, and what do you need to do to build tiers once you have it?"