"Huh! Do you know how far south the ice reaches on your world? If the sea is lower there, the water is probably bound up in more ice and things are generally colder. We can tell when the ice was at particular places by looking at the rocks it left behind, so if you know exactly where the ice is that narrows things down."

Xenife is getting back into excited speculation, and appears to have forgotten their sandwich.

(Their excitement is cute, not that he's going to comment on that and break their flow.)

The northern ice doesn't come very far south in this part of the world, but on the western bit of this continent it touches the north edge of widest part of the northern bulge - he thinks that bulge is an island here actually - and on the other continent they have some big lakes in the east, those are about as far south as the ice gets over there in his world.

They flip through their phone, looking up historical ice maps.

"The ice has been down that far a few times, but the most recent one was, uh, ..."

They put 32,0000 into their calculator to convert it.

"... 26,000 years ago, I think. Hmm. That matches up with mammoths being relatively common, and it is much older than our earliest records."

Wow. 

"Oh, did you want to see the maps?"

They put up a map of the known locations of the polar ice sheets during the last glacial minimum.

He has to peer at the map for a second to make sense of the projection, but that's home, yep! He grew up on the eastern side of the big southwestern lake on the other northerly continent.

"Neat! I've never been to that area, but I think that's where Windy Beach City is."

They lean back and look thoughtful for a moment.

"So it's possible you're from the past, then, and something happened to crafting between now and then. Or the future, and the planet's going to get colder between now and then. Or another planet that is just extremely suspiciously similar to this one. But supposing you are from the past, that gives us a general time to investigate. Do you know where your library is?"

Yeah, it's up in the mountains north of the middle lake on the other northerly continent - the main part of it, at least, there are a couple other sections connected by ansible. If the mountains are the same too he can probably find the exact spot here, he's been there often enough.

"I imagine the mountains should be the same, but of course I don't know. It would be interesting to see if we can find anything buried there."

He'll definitely want to go check it out at some point; the area he grew up in, too. Really there are a lot of places like that that he'd like to get a look at.

They nod.

"Do you know where you want to go once you've seen all of this city you want to?"

Not really; they have that upcoming planning event that he thinks is a cute idea, so he's waiting for that to think about it much. He might just do some wandering to get a feel for how things are different outside of cities before anything else.