"A church is where everybody who follows a particular god gets together to talk about that. My paladin is an Iomedaean so it's an Iomedaean church."

Twilight continues to be confused about what a 'god' is but she can probably figure that out by visiting the 'church'.

"Alright. I think that for the door to continue working you need to stay here, is that okay? If you tell us how to find your 'paladin' we can find them and bring them here so you can talk, since it sounds like you can't talk outside of Milliways?"

"Oh... I know his face but I don't know how to tell you about his face enough. Especially since you aren't used to people with two legs. His name is Ser Elorri Victor Goés though! If you can talk there then you can ask people for him."

"I know a spell for translation, I hope it works on two-legged people. We'll try to find him."

She casts Starswirl's Universal Translator* on herself and steps through Katixa's door. Her friends follow her, though they're hanging back, since they don't speak the language. What's on the other side?

(*) Literally just Tongues, since MLP might as well run on Pathfinder rules if it needs to have a coherent magic system anyway. Mechanically, Twilight is currently an Arcanist** 12 / Archmage 1 with some custom feats.

(**) Not quite, but explaining the subtleties would require a whole essay on Pathfinder reification that I'll write in some more appropriate forum.

Katixa was going into the stable from having gone out in the yard, so the door leads into the yard when she opens it going the other way. It's summer out, and the yard is green, with a trampled dirt path from the stable door (that they're now emerging "from") to the rectory in the one direction, and another to the sanctuary in the other direction. There's an apple tree and a neglected kitchen garden and a stone bench that has had some of its edges chipped away and an actually paved path to the street, through the gate in the fence.

(When it was an Asmodean church, the stable was not horse-operable, but a Reclamation paladin on assizes stopped in Westcrown a year ago and had the mechanisms changed out while he was there, just in case, even though he didn't have a magic horse of his own.)

They will head for the building that looks like it's meant to be open to the public.

The temple of Iomedae is whitewashed, large, and bustling. Everyone there is very busy, or is waiting for one of the busy people and getting in the way while they wait.

Still, a pastel pony is a distracting enough sight to briefly get everyone's attention, a cascade of people seeing her out of the corners of their eyes and turning their heads and alerting people who didn't spot her on their own.

A couple people draw swords and a few other people head for the far exit.

"... we come in peace!" she announces, seeing the swords. "I can explain but it's a slightly absurd explanation and I'd prefer to only have to prove it once."

That gets swords lowered but not actually sheathed and doesn't stop anybody who's already started for the exit. "Where's Iustin?" someone says, and, "This isn't an Iustin-only problem," and "Well, where's Lieutenant Sauer, or -" and then: "Select!"

The Select emerges from a room where he was taking a meeting. (The guy who was standing guard outside the door where he was doing that is among the drawn swords people.) "- what is going on?"

"We're from another world and got here mostly by accident. I can demonstrate this if you follow me to the stable. Our intentions are friendly and we definitely don't mean anyone any harm...unless they're an evil god I guess, I've heard this world has those."

Why is this happening. "Please excuse me," he says to another person emerging from the meeting room, and he wades through the remaining crowd to approach her. "- okay," he says, when he sees the portal, "so... there's a portal, and also all the horses that were inside the stable are now trapped there?"

"From my perspective, my closet was suddenly replaced with this room just like your stable was. I went in, and while I was inside, Katixa came in. I don't know what happened to the rest of your horses—actually, I think if you closed the door and then reopened it, you could get back into the building that's supposed to be there, but then you'd probably lose access to Milliways, and access to Milliways seems quite valuable in addition to representing my friends' and my most likely chance of getting home."

Blai looks thoughtfully at the portal for a minute, then looks over his shoulder. "Lieutenant Sauer? - has anyone seen - you there, would you like to run an errand for the Church, help out some of the paladins' horses -"

"Yes, Select?"

"Hunt up someone who can cut a hole in the side of the building neatly and hang a new door in it."

"Yes, Select." Off runs the randomly chosen citizen.

"Yeah, that's a good idea," she comments. "Anyway, the particularly valuable thing about Milliways that I've discovered so far is that if you're inside with the door closed, no time passes on the outside, and also you can buy books from—a very large number of worlds. I couldn't get a clear answer on how many worlds there are exactly but it's apparently larger than my language has a word for."

"You can do that in Axis, but - does this cost someone intervention budget?"

"Intervention budget?"

"- is any of this besides the welfare of the horses time-sensitive, I don't know how aggressively to prioritize conversation topics."

"... uh, there needs to be someone from your universe inside holding the door open at all times, and Katixa will probably get bored of that eventually, but I can't think of anything more urgent than that. As far as I know time is literally stopped in my world relative to us."

"Whose horse is Katixa, I don't know all the paladins' horses names or even which of them are awakened."

"She said his name was, uh, 'Ser Elorri Victor Goés'—oh yeah, another thing Milliways has is translation magic that allows your horses to talk, at least the ones who are people."

"He's not in but I would expect him to come back before nightfall. Ah, intervention budget is a limitation observed by gods seeking to influence the material plane. They would often work at cross purposes or simply exert too much power to be safe for mortals and our environs otherwise - or there may be other reasons, I have no expectation we've been informed of the full picture - at any rate, all of the books throughout Creation are copied to the First Vault in Axis, but one does not go book-shopping in Axis because this would be staggeringly expensive, due to the need to compensate the expenditure of that budget in addition to the materials and labor of the book itself."

"What ... is a 'god', I don't think Equestria has those."

"Gods are -

- I suppose it won't help if I say they are the kind of thing that empowers clerics?"

"No, I don't know what those are either. It sounds like a kind of spellcaster—I don't think we have spellcasters who were empowered by someone else, what would that even mean...um, I guess Princess Celestia made me an alicorn* and that made me more powerful, but I could already do magic before that and she definitely doesn't do it regularly."

(*) Tongues makes it obvious that this is the kind of pony Twilight is, with both wings and a horn.