Magic constructs could probably do those things, but it'd be a lot more expensive than just paying people to do them, and also they'd obviously be magic. (Also, she's pretty sure they could make bread? Making bread isn't any harder than the other things he mentioned.)

"How do you make the constructs if it's not wizards making them? ...And what jobs do most people do? It sounds like it's not mostly farming."

"We make machines the normal way, like craftsmen make things, out of metal and wood and so on, and power them with - well, mostly electricity, but that's too complicated to start with, do you want me to explain how a steam engine works?  And -" they're almost to the station anyway, they can take a detour to a different platform - "look at this train, it has a whole system of wheels and tracks and complicatedly shaped metal parts, but a blacksmith could make all this, right, if someone told him what it's supposed to look like and how it all fits together?  That's what machines are like.  There's no magic in this train, it's all complicated metal doing things metal normally does."

"...Normally metal doesn't, uh, move."

"Yes, that's the steam engine part.  All right, hmm--"  He has a pen in his pocket but no paper.  He can - ask to buy a small stack of napkins from the food kiosk, "I really need to explain steam engines to someone and I have nothing to draw on! Thank you!"

And they they should probably go to their platform before he gets started.  He can put his napkins on the wall so he can sketch on them.  "So first, if you just have a large fire boiling a large tank of water, you can have a narrow stream of steam that'll be strong enough to turn a wheel, the way a river turns a mill wheel, right?  This is not very useful but it's one way you can use fire to make metal move.  And then" - new napkin - "if instead you trap the steam like this with a piston in the middle, and alternate which side of the piston is getting the steam, it'll move back and forth, right?  Now here's how you use a piston to turn a wheel, and the wheel can reach back to make the alternating happen - and if you have a lot of steam and a lot of pressure, this can move a lot of metal.  This is how trains used to work - a big steam engine powering its wheels hard enough to pull several carriages behind itself." 

He is entirely capable of slowing down until she really gets it, if she seems interested, but he doesn't mind if she just wants the general idea and isn't excited about engineering.

She's not totally sure that that isn't magic, but either way she's clearly not supposed to say it's magic. She's not that interested in engineering, but if he's acting like it's important, she'll keep asking questions until it at least kind of makes sense.

He's really pretty good at drawing little models of what's going on, so she can probably get there, whether she really believes it or not.  (In the meantime their train shows up, and she gets her pick of a seat next to the window or in the middle of the compartment.)  It seems like he personally really likes the details, but the important part is just to make it clear that it's just normal things acting like they normally do but being put together in complicated ways - that anyone can do it once they know how. 

"So most people work in factories, working with machines to make engine parts or pens or shoes or canned food or a thousand other things.  Or they work in stores to sell the things, or drive trains and buses, or build houses or make roads or mine the metals and cut the wood.  Many people are still farmers, they just have machines to do a lot of the work for them.  There are teachers, doctors, soldiers, policemen, lawyers, engineers who design the machines...  I'm sure I missed some, but does that sound like reasonable work for people to be doing?"

"Some of them? I don't know, uh, some of the things you said factories make, or buses." (She is imagining someone whipping a train to make it go, even though that's probably not exactly right.) "And I'd never heard of doctors that actually, uh, work, before I came here, but if you have them, and your priests are too busy to heal people or something, then it makes sense that you've got doctors instead." 

(Teachers and soldiers and guardsmen and lawyers are all kind of suspicious jobs, but she's not going to say that.)

"... Priests can't generally heal people.  I mean, miracles happen sometimes, I think, but - I've never seen any, or heard from anyone who has."

"The circuit priest back home could heal injuries, I've seen him do it. ...If the priests here usually can't heal people then how can people tell whether they're actually priests?"

"I...'ve never thought about whether the priests are real priests?  I'm not really sure what you mean.  They do the work of priests, and that seems like what really matters..."  But he's only thinking out loud, and really she has a point.  "--No, you're right, if all the sacraments were invalid that would probably be a disaster... I don't know how we know they're real. I expect God would tell someone, if they weren't?"

"...why doesn't your god just give his priests healing, though?" Maybe their gods really are Evil? Except Asmodean priests still healed people sometimes, and it sounds like their priests do as well, just not very often for some reason.

What a question.  Why doesn't God do that?  It had never occurred to Marek to think of that as a possibility, but of course He could, so there must be a reason why not.  "So first, I don't know any of these things.  Nobody just has the ability to heal people all the time, it's-- it's as if you asked why doesn't God let everyone fly.  It's not as if He couldn't!  But if He hasn't it's probably because there's a reason things are better this way?  If I had to guess, priests can't heal people because God wants us to learn how to do it ourselves.  Or so that we come to church because we want to be good people and not just for the healing.  But again, I don't really know, and if you want to know you should ask a priest."

It genuinely doesn't occur to him that asking a priest might not be as good a solution as he thinks it is, if she's not sure they're real.

The gods want people to... learn how to be wizards? No, that doesn't make sense, they don't have any wizards (and if the gods here are Good, which it sounds like they're at least pretending to be, then they wouldn't want people casting Infernal Healing anyway).

"I think... I'm confused why Asmodeus gives people healing and your god doesn't. It's not like he's doing it to be nice, it's helpful for him if people can keep tending their fields, or women won't die giving birth." Wait, does that still apply if they've got a circuit-priest — well, sometimes, because sometimes the priest will be around at the right time.

"...And I've never heard anyone say priests of Good and Neutral gods are worse at healing." She thinks the Good gods are better, actually, but it's not really the sort of thing people talk about. 

"So... As far as I can tell no gods have ever given people consistent healing, and everything you've seen was a trick by people who really wanted to keep you under their power.  I can't really come up with explanations for why Asmodeus gives people healing and my god doesn't, because I don't believe that's true."  She's asking interesting questions, and there is a degree to which he's happy to have their conversations under the assumption that she's telling the truth.  But telling the truth is not the same as being right, and he doesn't want to end up having the sort of conversation where he's just humoring her.  That would be lying, and the sort that feels entirely pointless.

".........is there some way to use, uh, steam power, or something, to trick people into thinking that you fixed someone's broken bone, or stopped someone from bleeding out?"

"Not steam power," a bit of a smile, "but yes, I think there are ways to do that, and people have done it." 

...This is a bad argument, and he can't possibly ask her to trust it. 

"I don't know enough about them to really explain how.  It's... it's not that I think you should believe me.  You probably shouldn't.  I'm just one person who claims everything works completely differently than you think it does, of course you're not going to believe me - and for me you're just one person who claims that too, right?  I don't think we can convince each other by sitting here and talking.  Because, well, I think people have been lying to you, and you think people have been lying to me, and - my feeling that people aren't lying to me is built on so many different pieces that I can't list all of them, let alone do it so they'll make sense to you."  Most things can't be settled by sitting around and talking, or at least most things that matter.  You have to go out and try doing something.

"—I mean, the Asmodeans were definitely lying about some things! I just think it would've been hard for them to lie about being able to heal people at all. And I don't know if people have been lying to you or not, it might be that your god—" (isn't as strong, but that's probably heretical) "—would rather give them different powers instead of healing, or something."

Presumably he's being lied to about some things, like the election, but maybe not anything that's actually relevant to this.