"I think it might be productive," she says to everyone, "if we learned a little more about magic here."

"I acquired those books I could from a semi-public bookstore, but most of the more interesting things will be in private libraries. Still, I had some of my own, back in Melbourne, though I lost the best volumes when that train crashed."

"A shame. Good books are hard to come by."

"They are. It was quite tragic."

"Perhaps we can look through these, then."

"Alright." She stands to fetch them. There's about ten books, mostly fairly slim, mostly in fairly archaic language, mostly not exceptionally useful, none of them exactly introductory primers...

She thinks Hisame has the best chance of any of them of doing something with this information. She'll prod her into paying attention, if necessary.

Hisame will pay attention! She likes archaic old books!

This one's rather fascinating too, really - it's an old alchemical text, easily from the middle ages, full of as much metaphor as substance but with formulas Nausicaa confirms work - 

Hisame is delighted, and gets into an extremely in depth and rapidly technical discussion with Nausicaa about differences in chemistry, magic, and magical chemistry between their worlds.

This is good. She is glad.

These chemistries bear a very bizarre and at times only figurative relationship to anything the Keres will be familiar with! Hisame's is more familiar, at least - she's mostly talking about the odd impacts of chakra on a sensible underlying chemistry.

Nausicaa's world's chemistry is downright weird for a world that manages to look at all familiar.

Very strange indeed. She pulls out some tinkers with chemistry knowledge. This only helps a little.

Nausicaa's description of the process she followed to become unaging sounds like it was written by someone high on something very interesting. It's possible this magic system doesn't make much intrinsic sense - though there's certainly an almost literary pattern to it.

Odd way for a world to work. Smacks of intelligent design.

Nausicaa's almost entirely sure the Christians are wrong, for what it's worth, but she can't claim there was no design involved anywhere...

Of course. But it does bear a resemblance to creation myths, though perhaps in reverse. Chaos burgeoning out of raw order...

Hm. She's fairly sure the chaos predates the order, in some ways... But it's hard to tell, though - 

Pre-Breaking writings suggest their world was something of an island of order in a sea of chaos.

That does accord with the traditional order of things.

But, yeah, figuring out what's the actual case might take more time, effort, or resources than they have or are willing to spend... It'd be fascinating, though.

It will take longer than one train ride, certainly.

Even a long one like this.

Eventually, even, it's time to sleep.

The rocking takes some getting used to. Reminds her of sleep aboard a ship.

The next morning - 

There's a woman in their car.

She's dressed well, in dark purples with flashes of white behind the black tufts of lace in her elaborate hat. Diamonds sparkle around her neck, trapped in cages of silver. Her face is hard to focus on.

She's sitting primly on one of their overstuffed chairs, hands folded in her lap, back straight, head turned as if she's looking out the window.

Huh.

A fey, presumably.

"Hello."

"Hello," she says, voice melodic. "You're an interesting group. Eliana Fabil. Uchiha Hisame. Mora, of the body of Nausicaa Uzun." And a hint of a smile to her voice: "And one more... Though you wouldn't like it if I spoke your name, would you?"

The Keres glares at the figure.