"Do you have, like, extra awesome proprioception that tells you where all your organs and nerves and stuff are and what they're doing?"

"Yeah - some of that's part of the shapeshifting package, some of that's trial and error sticking new nerves in places."

"That's really cool. I'd be so nervous about doing trial and error on myself that way. When I learn enough engineering I'll probably make a new body and test it a lot until I'm sure it's better than my current one and then move myself over."

They both seem to have forgotten to race, and reach the facility about the same time. Silv lands and transforms back into their earlier face.

"I'm used to healing magic existing might be a big difference, and as long as I don't touch my brain I can change out of a form pretty easy. A more top-down design sounds like it'd be its own kind of fun, though."

"That makes a lot of sense! My world has pretty good medicine but probably a lot worse than your healing magic for that sort of thing. And definitely worse than having an undo option in the shapeshifting." She's very glad Silv is not going to get hurt more than temporarily.

"Yeah. It's - pretty important, I think, to have good healing."

"My world will get there eventually, I think--we keep inventing new things, in medicine and everything else. It's harder without magic but a lot of stuff we haven't figured out yet ought to be possible in principle."

"That's good."

"Is your world's magic the kind where you can invent new things, or is there a fixed set of things it does and all you can invent is new ways to use them?"

"Second, unfortunately. Far as I know, at least."

"Oh well, it's still cool. And presumably you can invent new technological things just the same, so you come out ahead in the end."

"Probably! We have less pressure to, though, I think, or have just had less luck with discoveries than most worlds with like robots..."

"Maybe. I don't really know what makes societies invent things more or less quickly. Maybe Marel does; I'll ask her when we drop off our stuff."

"Yeah. That sounds like her wheelhouse."

Then they can go do that, since they needed to anyway! Presumably Marel is as findable as she usually is.

Exactly as such.

"I trust everything's gone well?"

"Yup! Silv's an awesome co-worker." They show her their haul of this, that, and the other.

"It's good you two got along."

"Margaret's really nice to work with."

Totally internal eeeeee. "So there's something we were curious about. You've heard about a lot of worlds, right? Do you have a sense for what a world having magic does to how technology gets developed there?"

"Some of one, though there's a lot of confounding variables."

"Yeah, I guess the first question is how similar worlds without magic end up. If everyone invents things at a different speed in a different order even when they're working from the same physics, it would be harder to tell whether magic affected it."

She nods. "Even worlds with very similar species and starting conditions can end up very dissimilar - small changes in what bacteria evolve, in people's actions in response to crises, even in things like metal deposits... It all makes a fairly large difference. There are quite a few worlds that end up nearly identical despite radically different magic and physics systems - but they're identical on the level of the same people existing with the same DNA and similar circumstances. It's a bit too much to be coincidence, so I tend to disregard worlds that have what can only be called fate governing them when considering how worlds naturally evolve. Or, at least, consider them in another category."

"Wow. Fate sounds bizzare. Does my world have that, do you know?"

"It's hard to say - I think there's a good chance not, though, but that rather your world provides the template for a few other worlds - there's a good number of Earths with masquerades that somehow don't diverge strongly from your world."