This door was supposed to lead to the hall closet with the cleaning supplies, but Bella doesn't see any good way to mop up spilled soup from the kitchen floor. "Extraplanar studies students," she mutters, stomping into the bar in her nice useful boots. If she takes notes on this place she can probably get extra credit somewhere for it. She goes up to the bar, and notes the lack of bartender. Maybe they stepped out for a minute.
She looks around, taking stock of the sudden change. The young woman standing at the bar seems to be her best option for information-gathering. Which means she'll need to-shudder, shudder-talk to an unfamiliar person.
"Pardon me," she says, "I seem to have somehow wandered into this bar. Have you any idea where we are or how I might have gotten here from my living room?"
"Parvati. Pleasure to meet you," she says. The mention of subtle arts piques her curiosity, but it's already been established that this Bella person goes to a weird school with weird majors, and the strange magic bar is probably more pressing. "It seems this bar...teleports, somehow? What part of the country do you live in?"
"You have to be born with subtle arts, although there's some debate if you can get from 'no potential' to 'some potential' or just from 'no discernible potential' to 'discernible potential'. At home anybody can pick up magic if they're smart enough, but I don't know if your plane will allow it."
"Oh, thank you," she says, smiling. Magic is much more fun when she can just study it, instead of feeling obligated to use it. "Would you be willing to tell me more? I'm afraid I've been terribly rude, peppering you with questions...oh, would you like a coffee? This is a bar, after all, and I think I have some money." She starts rooting around in the pockets of her jeans.
"I don't m-" She blinks at the napkin. "Oh, huh, lucky us. I usually avoid coffee, though, it messes with my sleep patterns. Uh, hot chocolate?" She addresses this to the bar as though that's only a mildly odd thing to do and receives a large mug of hot chocolate. With marshmallows. "Thanks."
"Subtle artists do mental perception and interaction, and some of us can also do telekinesis or pyrokinesis. I'm well above average for people with perceptible talent but hardly top percentile."
"Oh, congratulations on being above average. Can you do pyrokinesis? I do hydrokinesis, so that would be rather ironic." She notices the napkin. "Erm, thank you? Are you alive?" (This is hardly fair, she can barely talk to humans, how is she supposed to know what to say to a bar?)
"Teek...oh! Oh, telekinesis, it's an abbreviation. That must be quite helpful for everyday tasks." Her cat, meanwhile, is winding his way around her legs in a desperate plea for attention. She picks him up and places him on a barstool, then addresses the bar again. "So, if you're a person, could you please tell me just how you managed to appear outside my living room?"
The door leads to any door based on patterns or whims to which I am not privy. When you each open it, it will lead back to your respective worlds.
"I suppose it would be difficult. I can sympathize. It took Lord-knows-how-many hours of work to get my powers to do anything useful. At least you have professors who know what they're doing." Parvati may be a little jealous. "If you weren't a subtle artist, what other types of magic would you want to learn?"
"How do you manage that, if you don't mind me asking?" she asks the bar. Her cat meows. "And does the 'first drink is free' rule apply only to people, or could I get my cat a treat?" She turns to Bella.
"Would you mind telling me more about arcane magic? And also...gods, plural?"
"A bowl of milk, then, please," she says. "Hmm, perhaps it would be more productive to acquire some textbooks from your plane, instead of grilling you. Erm...bar-person, what would happen if I tried to go to her plane? Would I be able to get back? And yes, just the one god. Well, I believe there's just the one god, but people from other religions think differently. I wonder if any of the gods from your plane bear any similarities to mine. I've always been a bit frustrated that we can't prove his existence, but if people worship him on your plane, that would be rather strong evidence."
If she holds the door for you, you can enter her world, but you would not have any special advantage from there at obtaining a door on request, which most patrons cannot do.
"The major deity where I live is Khersis, but Mother Khaele also gets attention, and there are plenty of others who are just less locally popular. Yours is shy? ...The ones from the other religions are also shy?"
Then, Bella. "Do yours interact with you? That must be nice. Mine doesn't do that anymore, hence my inability to confirm that he exists. Same with all the others. Perhaps your plane is different in a significant way?" She vaguely recalls reading a book series in which God showed up in another world as a lion. A much more proactive lion.
"How often do people find you? Is there some way to scientifically test when and where the doors tend to appear?"
It's tempting to start reading some of them now, but it also seems a bit rude to start reading with Bella sitting right there.
"So, what do you like to do, besides magic?"
Then, Bella. "You're magic and from another world, I will probably find even the most mundane details of your life interesting. Reading is essentially what I do in my spare time, though I prefer scientific texts to fiction, how about you? And what's a skirmish game?"
"I like old fiction - and - wait, did you just contrast science and fiction? Skirmish is a combat game, with mockboxes so nobody actually gets killed, there's interesting tactics if the players are good."
"Skirmish matches sound like the sort of thing my brothers would be interested in," she says to Bella. "I suppose I do look a bit young to be reading books about physics in my spare time, but yes, books about real science as opposed to science fiction. I enjoy science fiction sometimes, but there are too many books out there without sufficient worldbuilding. Even if the universe is fictional, the rules governing it ought to be consistent, don't you agree?"
"I'm sorry," she says to Bella. "I suppose we haven't quite gotten a handle on planar differences yet. Was there a specific thing I said that was especially confusing?"
"What do you mean by 'swat'? And when you say you can't do science, do you mean that you can't invent things? Or that you can't empirically test things? Or that the scientific method doesn't work? Or is it something else entirely?" Parvati suspects that the answer will not be one that she likes.
"If you try to pin down the laws of nature by running tests on them over and over to make sure they're the same, especially if you're going to do anything more important than small consumer goods with the results, your best case scenario is that they just stop being the same. You can try stuff, you can get a sense sort of by coincidence over time of how things can be expected to go, but nothing you can count on always like in - science fiction novels."
"There's speculation. The universe is shy. The universe wants to be able to do favors to people it likes and spite people it doesn't like for whatever reasons lead it to do the one or the other. Magic and science are fundamentally incompatible - though it sounds like you prove that's not always the case."
"Yes, my magic dovetails nicely with scientific investigation," she says. "But...the universe isn't supposed to do favors or be shy. The universe isn't supposed to be sentient. It's the universe. It's supposed to follow the rules." She has to take another deep breath. "I'm sorry. This is quite a lot to take in."
"It is, in fact, quite nice," says Parvati. "I suppose I've never realized just how nice it is, considering. I wish I could offer you the opportunity to come home with me. My family wouldn't mind giving you a place to stay, but there's no one around who could teach you English properly, and I don't know how different our cultures are, and besides, I'm sure there's...something worth going back to in your world. Parents, or something."
"I do have parents. I could cheat on the language thing with subtle arts if I had permission but - yeah. Also, I don't know if it's safe for me to try to escape, considering the universe doesn't like it if people cheat it and I don't know if I currently count as out of reach for it."
My strong suspicion is that you are not going to be "swatted" in the environs of Milliways, nor across it while in another world, says Bar. If non-Milliways transit mechanisms are involved and you have the attention of forces which can use them I have no special expertise.
"So, it's probably not a strong possibility, unless you've attracted the attention of...the universe," says Parvati. "That is good to know. Thank you. I'd...I hope you don't mind, I do like you, but would you mind terribly not putting my world at risk? I won't stop you if you want to visit anyway, of course."
"You're making it sound a lot more formal than it is. I don't know that they're on the same level - dragons in particular come in lots of kinds, some of which are much bigger deals than others - but they're all things I wouldn't want to poke. I also try to avoid dwelling on the remote possibility of ascension."
"Hm." Parvati is tempted to ask what Bella would do as a god, but decides not to poke at the subject, as it seems to upset her. "As far as I know, our gods don't work like that. Speaking of which, I think I wanted to compare characteristics of our world's gods, but I got distracted by the bar. What is...Khersis like?"
"He's, uh, very popular, a lot of the Imperium's legal and social customs are Khersian in origin. Depending on who you ask he either used to be a human good and proper, or he spent some time incarnated. His followers tend to be socially conservative and annoying and usually human or part-human."
"That sounds similar to mine, although there's been a backlash against religiously-influenced laws in my country. Mine reportedly spent some time as a human as well. There's also a stereotype that his followers are socially conservative, but that isn't at all evident at my church. What are the main tenets of his teachings? Mine's most famous for preaching about self-sacrificial love and kindness towards others. Well, technically he's most famous for some of the more socially conservative ideas, but those don't come up as much at my church."
"I don't really go in for the... details of theology. It has seemed unwise. Uh, there are Khersian orders of paladins? There's a law that anybody who's even a little bit human in their ancestry gets treated like a human because of the 'human blood, human soul' doctrine?"
"All right. My god is, but he hasn't exactly stepped forth to confirm it. There are definitely similarities between the two, but that could be coincidental, and anyway it's not enough to prove that they're the same person." Parvati shrugs. "Also, from the way you talk about him, yours seems more prone to smiting people who disagree with him. This isn't inconsistent with the way mine has reportedly behaved, but I feel like if mine wanted to smite people he would have shown up and done so sometime in recent memory. Does yours smite people often, or am I misunderstanding you?"
"Oh, no, not often, at least not lately. I just - want a lot of stopping distance between me and accidentally blaspheming actionably or developing too much hubris. So I'm careful about it to a degree that probably makes me look super pious to anyone who doesn't actually know me."
"Understandable," says Parvati. "Out of curiosity, if you woke up one day and found that your universe had picked a set of consistent rules and started following it, and gods, dragons, and fae were no longer a problem, what would you do? I'm only asking because this bar seems to be out of your universe's reach, so feel free to refuse to answer if you think I'm putting you in danger."
Parvati rubs her temple. "Yes, sorry, I suppose the phrase 'logical consequences' has different meanings in different worlds. You said people in your world have a sense of how things are expected to go. Let's say the universe's new rules fell within the parameters of that expectation."
"I'm starting to think this question is more trouble than it's worth. I suppose I could have said 'what would you do if you were transported into a science fiction book' or 'what would you do if it were safe to come to my world,' but those questions come with their own set of complications."
"It varies from artist to artist, but I have a passive awareness that you're there and have a mind, and I'll have that awareness unless there's something weird going on with one or both of us. Reading you would involve focusing down on that awareness - it takes a lot of concentration to sustain but not much to start. Sort of like staring really hard at a small point."
"...I don't think so, but I haven't done any elaborate math, it might get weird up in the complicated bits? Two and two is four; in any situation I can readily think of where that would inconvenience the universe it could just make a thing appear or disappear instead of changing the underlying numbers. Anyway, I'm in my second semester and I'm taking Utility Psionics 2, Intro to Mental Healing - there's basically no therapy stuff in there, it's like part law-and-liability, part shoring up shields so people's trauma doesn't bite us, part these-are-the-kinds-of-mental-healing-
"It fills my survival credit requirement. You take any one delving-and-discovery course - or one that's been put in that section of the course catalog and doesn't strictly contain any delving - and then it's out of the way. Supposedly supposed to reduce the number of campus deaths, I guess the weapons policy and the weapon proficiency credit weren't doing enough for that."
"I stay on the warded paths or indoors at night. It's not hard to avoid getting killed if nobody's actually out to murder you, on campus. And if somebody's out to murder me they'll probably be other students who've taken all the same required courses or better."
She's quiet for a while. She takes a few sips of her coffee.
"This is frustrating," she says. "It's as if the universe waltzed up to me and said, 'Greetings, Parvati. Remember that time we gave you an exciting shiny doodad that opened up infinite possibilities and forever changed the way you conceptualize the world? And remember how it ruined all your plans and you had to make a lot of serious readjustments to get your life back on track? And you know how you're only just now getting used to it? Well, here's another exciting shiny thing, that's about ten times more exciting and shiny, but you're not allowed to analyze the inner workings and you don't have the resources to solve any of the problems that come with it. It's just going to sit in your field of vision forever, being exciting and shiny and mocking you for the rest of your life. Have fun!' And I'm sorry, I don't mean to take this out on you, you're in no way at fault and you have no obligation to listen to my rambling, and this is a ridiculous problem to complain about, all told, but I'm a bit rattled all the same!"
"My hydrokinesis," she says, calming down. "I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but the existence of magic isn't widely known in my world. I'm not sure if that's because it's uncommon, or because no one else has been willing to put in enough work to make their powers do anything significant. It was...disquieting, at first, but I've managed to adjust. Because my power follows rules and allows me to investigate the reasons for the rules."
"I'm not sure. I don't even know if anyone else has them. It might just be me. Or it could be that randomly-ocurring magical powers are a recent phenomenon and those who have them are loathe to disrupt the status quo. Or perhaps no one else has been willing to put forth the amount of effort necessary to get any useful results." She smiles a bit at that last one. She's quite proud of herself for putting in the amount of effort she did.
"In my spare time, I read, but I don't tend to have a lot of spare time, what with schoolwork and math team and quiz bowl and various academic competitions and volunteer work and practicing magic and organizing my neighbors' attics and basements and whatnot for a little extra money. That's almost irrelevant, though. The sort of media coverage I'd anticipate would likely hinder my ability to attend school unmolested, at least for a while."
"I did consider that!" She grins. "I may or may not have designed an outfit and picked a stupid name. Unfortunately, I don't think I could pull it off, and besides, it wouldn't suit my end goals. Which are 'use my powers to help people as much as I possibly can for the rest of my life' at worst and 'find a decent amount of other magical people, set up some sort of training program so that we can all help people as much as we possibly can, then spend the rest of my life studying magic and how it works and helping people on an as-needed basis.' In case you were curious."
"I still wouldn't have the faintest idea where to start," she says. "I mean, I've done some research, I have a vague idea of what our world's major water-related problems are, but most of them aren't in places a fifteen-year-old can easily get to. And besides, most of them aren't fixable at my current power level. I'm already doing small, helpful things anonymously, like cleaning ice off of major roads in the winter. I'll consider super-heroism again once I can control larger amounts of water and have a way to get to hurricane impact zones quickly."
"Comes with some pretty negative side effects? Yes, understandable. And I don't mean to be a...world snob, or anything. I don't want to act like my world is perfect and wonderful and yours is contemptible in every way. People in my world probably die of injuries that would be easily preventable in your world, for example."
"On the twenty end, it'd be - surface or routinely surface-contacting nations, most but not all populated principally by humans, that are countrylike in structure, mutually recognize each other's countryhood, etcetera. On the fifteen thousand end we start counting individual bands of goblins and pods of merfolk and certain church or monastic collectives and the occasional individual dragon and so on as sovereign in their own right, which might in a certain light be closer to the practical reality of how fragmented the world is, but would involve a lot of 'countries' partially geographically coextensive with each other, unrecognized by other countries as independent political units, and not undertaking most of the activities that are most paradigmatically country-like. Oh, and this is just the Prime Material plane, I don't know enough about the other planes adjoining it within the scope of my own world to even guess what their setup is like."