It's a slow day at Milliways, and the kobold is getting bored. Usually she'd solve this with a math lesson, or a conversation with Bar, or just heading home to catch up with her tribe, but one of her friends asked her to do some scouting, recently, so that's today's task. She goes up to her room for it, makes a portal to a random ship, and watches.
"They're probably fairly similar to you for tech level in general; I was looking for spaceships similar to theirs. They do have really good computers, including some specialized nonperson AI and sensory hardware, for the level they're at. The civilization doesn't have access to Milliways, though; that's usually a personal thing."
"People mostly can't get to Milliways when they choose to; they get a door when Milliways chooses to give them one. And it doesn't stick around afterward to let them prove what happened, so most people just don't tell anyone what happened at all. I can get there with my own magic, but that's very rare."
"Hm. One sec." She closes her eyes and leans against the wall for a moment. "I can teleport back here - I can't always, with spaceships - so I can give you a way to get in touch with me and come back and talk to you again, if you want. I don't usually bring people to Milliways unless I know them pretty well, though."
"I don't usually worry about the behavior of people I hold doors for into public places and I'm curious where that assumption breaks down - the place is private and there's some social expectation of responsibility for your guests? Things are very likely to turn out to have uncommunicated rules about them there? It's more investment than holding the door?"
"A little bit of all of those, yeah. Milliways' magic usually makes sure there aren't people there at the same time who'll upset each other too much, and my magic doesn't have that, and I wouldn't be surprised if it stops cooperating with my magic somehow if I start causing problems that way.
She nods. "I can get electronics, but they're usually not worth the trouble of setting up. If it's inconvenient for you to get paper I can just enspell some pebbles or something to go to the same place and look for them, but that doesn't let you send any kind of complex message."
"All right." She retrieves a length of twine from a belt pouch, spends a moment turning it into a portal, and then retrieves a piece of sturdy plastic from that. Another moment and the plastic has a portal on it, too, an inch-wide circle with darkness on the other side. She passes it over: "is that all right?"
"It's no trouble." She makes another twineportal and signs into this one; the effect is quite strange, and her hands come back with a written-on napkin. "Bar says they use a variety of methods but mostly accessing forgotten bank accounts and using time magic with compound interest."
"It's not that unusual for things to repeat, between universes - Earths are unusual for how common they are, but most planets will have a duplicate somewhere if you check. Cultures and languages repeat, too, and people. They're usually not identical, but they're very close - it's sort of like there's a default thing that Earths are like, and then most Earths have one or two changes from that, like magic or a plague or being in the past or the future or something."
"Hm - well, an example of what I'm thinking of would be if another civilization - ideally one with an Earth, so translation can be handled through Earth languages without everyone needing to have a pendant - maybe not at our tech level exactly but close enough to understand the general shape of our tech scene and vice versa, were to get in touch with us, perhaps with a pure data connection - can you run wires through your portals? - to share information and ideas."
"Hm. I don't think Green's government would make an exception for interdimensional humans, and that's the closest I have handy. - Green is an AI; there was a war between the AI and their world's humans, and the AIs won it. Their humans are okay but they're not allowed to have enough tech to develop AIs or leave Earth."
"Mmhmm - ten billion, about. And most of the current generation isn't trained in anything very useful, they don't ask their humans to work. What they'd like to do is change the policies for the next generation, give them more incentives to learn skills that will let them contribute to your society and not let them have children until they leave."
"Let's see - yesterday there was live music in the evening, and I spent the afternoon practicing algebra with a kid who brought their homework in by accident. The day before that everyone who got a door was from a post-apocalyptic world, and I did magic for some of them. The day before that, the bar was taken up by someone charting out some kind of plan, and the crowd was kind of boring aside from that - we did have someone come in wanting to trade some pretty pottery, though. The day before that... I spent some time with my tribe, so it gets harder to remember, but the last day I spent in Milliways before that I think was the one where the dragon with the shapeshifting magic came through and a bunch of us went flying with them... the day before that was pretty boring, I remember thinking about that while I was flying... I don't think I can remember back farther than that very accurately but the day before that might have been the one where a couple of demigods got into a wrestling match in the backyard."
"A bunch of them had permanent bases and were scavenging for supplies, and being able to teleport things and people home helps amazingly with that, you can get ten times as much done on a trip pretty easily sometimes. I did portable portals for getting food and water from home instead of having to carry it for a bunch of them, too. And some of them wanted portals to other bases or emergency boltholes, and a couple of them had magic in the world and I made things that could detect it for them."
"The Federation forbids genetic engineering. It takes a very hard line on that. I can't in good conscience recommend engineered refugees come through them and don't have the expertise to recommend another civilization for them. The Federation is not always perpetually at peace; some of our neighbors are unfriendly."
"Starfleet handles it but there aren't strong anti-war-crime norms that are in effect galactically; sometimes someone aims at a Federation civilian population. The important planets are well-defended and the unimportant planets aren't interesting targets, but it's a consideration if someone happens to come from a background of universal peace."
As soon as T'mir touches the kobold, they're in a cave. It's much dimmer, though not to dim to see, and the rock forms a series of shelves that are absolutely covered with an amazing variety of stuff - necklaces and vials and a cloak and a stack of books and a basket of spheres glowing softly in red and green and orange and another basket full of black sticks and a collection of small abstract glass sculptures with blobs of color moving inside and much more, in a chaotic jumble of aesthetic styles and with none of it labeled except for a few cases where the item itself has a name imprinted in plain English. There's also a pile of cardboard at one side of the clearing they've appeared in, with one propped-up piece showing T'mir's control room on the other side of a portal; the kobold goes to it and pinches the corner and the portal disappears.
"Most of it is for mobility or stealth, one way or another - that's an invisibility cloak, those let you breathe underwater, that one muffles sound, the footcovers there make you jump higher, things like that. The way my magic works, I can't teleport somewhere specific unless I've been there, so being able to get more places is useful."
"There's two ways I can do it; one's about having been there and the other one can work off of a description, sort of, but it gives a random place that fits the description if there's more than one, and there usually is. The second kind is how I found your ship; 'spaceship' isn't the kind of thing the magic can work with but 'an object too small to have its own atmosphere, but with enough of the right kind of air in it for me to be okay there' doesn't get very much else."
"Sure." She sits, leaning against one of the stone outcroppings. "My world actually has two magic systems; the other one just happens to people, instead of anyone being in control of it. What happens with that is that you get inspired, and can't really focus on anything else except making the artifact that the magic is inspiring you to make. It's kind of dangerous, people go insane sometimes if they can't find the materials they need, but if they make their artifact, it's magic, and sometimes it's a kind of thing that nobody has seen before - a new tool, sometimes, or a weapon, or clothing or armor that helps whoever wears it. And that happened to me, and my artifact is the mental tool, called a spell form, that I use to cast with. And I think being able to make portals that have light come through the wrong way is the artifact magic of my spell form."
"Like - you could have an artifact bowl that turned water you poured into it into soup; turning water into soup would be the bowl's artifact magic. The spell form isn't a thing in the real world, like a bowl is, but it's still a thing that exists and can have artifact magic like that."