Shrug. "I figure not. But it is context."

"Yeah," she sighs.

"Does your world get pretty bad?"

"Yyyyeah. Erm—are you done with the histories of your universes?"

"Well, Elsewhere might count as its own world, but most of its modern history is a branch of Elan's. We can research Elsewhere's ancient history from Bar, but..." Felix shrugs.

"Well, tell me about how it continues? And then we can figure it out via Bar, and then I guess I can tell you about my world."

Katur continues the history. The most notable points were three wars that erupted around the world. Elsewhere was only a little affected because "destroy the portals" was one of the key practices of the first war and due to the nature of the portals (you can't really pick where they land, only try randomly until you get something useful). During the third war Elsewhere completely closed itself off from Elan well in advance. During this time Earth - which was already annexed to Elsewhere at this point and was regarded as somewhat backwater - managed to go through the industrial revolution, which prompted the interested of an enclave of Elsewhere-based groups. This enclave managed to hold nearly-exclusive monopoly on the transportation between worlds; specifically, the transport of Earth's industrialized products to Elan.

"Is that true to this day?"

"Yes, honestly, the status quo is a bit ridiculous and harmful, but no one feels compelled to change things and has the power to do so correctly."

"Why can't other people just open their own portals?"

"Portal-making isn't an absolute secret, but it is a well-guarded one, enough that most people that have it will have economic incentives to keep it a secret. There are smugglers though, my family for example. Portal-making is lifeforce intensive too and the other end of the portal is pretty much random, so it isn't something that you can do trivially."

"Also, revealing magic to Earth would be trivial, doing so responsibly or safely would be the problem. Which doesn't mean that open relations between worlds wouldn't be beneficial."

"...so I could help with that, huh?"

"I love the way you think."

"I firmly maintain that it's the only sensible way to think."

"It most certainly is. Even if all you could do was replicating portals that would help immensely."

"Isn't it good that I can probably do a lot more than just that?"

"I think he is trying not keeping his hopes up, because he might pass out with joy if you can do targeted portals."

"I'm not sure I could get quite there, but at the very least I can replace lost vitality things, yeah."

"Any help is appreciated, a whole lot."

She grins. "Any more history?"

"We pretty much ran out of things to say about our worlds. How about yours?"

"Mmmine, right. So there are four types of mage, and with one potentially huge exception, all magic in my world was produced by one, and none of it can have permanent effects. People are born a certain kind, and mine cannot produce any magic natively, but we can see and manipulate all sorts of magic. Also there's a religious taboo about it and if anyone in the theocracy that is my world discovers you doing metamancy you are excommunicated and executed."

Katur nods solemnly; he received most of the explanation earlier. "Is that the only religion? How would they react to sorcery and our worlds cluster?"

"It's pretty much the only religion. There might've been others, but not for hundreds of years. Or, I guess it's a religion template—there are local variants with minor gods and saints here and there. It's just, everyone agrees that there are the four main gods, one for each kind of mage, and the metamancer one is evil." She shrugs. "I'm not sure how they'd react. They might conclude other worlds have other gods and therefore work differently—there certainly are enough economic incentives for this, here."