"I can only imagine it would be fairly terrifying to find oneself in a different world. How are you holding up?"

"As well as could be expected, I think? The charming language software is helping a lot."

"I think she's a girl," Xander whispers to the charming language software.

"That language software was a personal project of my parent's, a very long time ago. We have them in every city big enough to support the infrastructure for them, but I must say they're not typically nearly this useful." 

"Well, I'm not sure what could have been improved about the process even if we'd been a commonplace event, so, thank you for your planet's hospitality."

"Our pleasure. If you decide to settle in the Radch I think there are places where the wings won't attract much unease."

"...where else would we settle?"

"There are human and human-descended populations outside the Radch which would likely be open to unusual refugees."

"Well, the Radch seems hospitable so far. - Human-descended?"

"The Radch opposes drastic genetic modification, though of course we have committed substantial resources to the correction of specific chromosomal anomolies and genes linked to disease, as well as to genetic treatments that extend the span of natural life. Not all human populations have taken the same stance, and there are planets whose inhabitants have seven limbs, or none, where you might be welcome."

"I have this nonmagical twin here," she says, inclining her head toward Xander.

"Four limbs all the way."

"Four is all I've ever wanted. Uh, per body."

"I had to do something if I wanted magic and wings are the most practical option besides extra arms, and I didn't want to do both."

"How does that work, exactly?"

"Two percent of girls, where we're from, get access to magic at any time between the ages of eight and sixteen. It comes in the form of the option to - shapeshift, basically. If we ignore it, it goes away. If we do a little bit with it but not much, it takes longer to go away, but still does. If we do more than that but not too much, then we get access to the clothes thing plus individual magic powers -" She holds up her gloves and adjusts them; they aren't really pretty enough yet, she did them hastily. "- but if we do too much, get too far away from baseline human, then we lose our minds and run off to... eat pigeons or whatever, I'm not sure what cryptids do all day."

"That's useful."

"Yes."

"If there are more of you -- and I have no evidence on that front yet but it sounds like there's no reason to make any assumptions either way - I think the existence of a known threshold at which the alterations make magical girls cease to be characteristically human will lend itself to the conclusion that modifications short of that are compatible with Radchaai citizenship."

"It sure sounded to me like you just don't have magical girls here and never did. I don't have the whole point system for safe body mods memorized, unfortunately."

"We certainly don't seem to. But if they start appearing at random it'll be useful to have a framework for reasoning about them."

"We were eaten by a cryptid on our way here. I don't think it's likely to manage to eat many other people but I suppose since it seems to have teleportation magic it might be hard to stop."

"Has anyone heard of anything like that happening before?"

"Cryptids are a known phenomenon and some of them keep their magic, although that one having it in particular is surprising. But they're usually not hostile, especially to magical girls, and I'm not aware of any magical girl or cryptid having previously interacted with other universes in any capacity."

Nod. "Other universes aren't known to us either."