The dining hall is serving rabbit stew and bread and cheese and porridge but there's a line and Kaja says, "Go wait with the novices, we're served first," and by the time the novices get there the cheese is gone and the stew is being doled out in very small amounts.

Eh, she's eaten worse.

Is Kaja available to sit with?

Yep, there's space at her part of this table!

Jian makes her way over.

"Hi! These are Colborn and Signe."

"Hi," says Signe.

"Hey. I'm Jian."

"Kaja said you told her you're from another globe."

"Yup. Mine's in contact with a few others. I got caught up in a transport accident."

"How are you in contact?" asks Kaja.

"Where were you trying to go?" wonders Colborn.

"We have people who can move between the worlds and bring information with them. And I don't actually know where we were going, someone else was controlling the transport mechanism kind of hastily since we were running away from a fight we didn't want to have."

"What kind of fight?"

"Mostly politically a pain in the ass. Some people were trying to kill my friends' mom because they felt she was too strong to leave alive, and she'd committed a pretty major crime like fifteen years ago. She probably would've been willing to go to trial - she'd been trying to just exile herself - but they didn't want to stop and ask, and fighting them could've really easily spiraled out of control. So, we were going to get so they didn't know where we were, regroup, and probably drop the person everyone was fighting over off on some really far off and obscure world, if it didn't look like we could just bring her in for trial peacefully."

"Is this a really obscure world?" wonders Signe.

"We'd probably favor more hard to reach than unknown..."

"What do you mean?"

"Unknown places can be found, sometimes pretty easily, but some worlds are harder to get to than others, and that's pretty consistent."

"I guess this can't be too hard to get to if you did it by accident."

"That's what I'm figuring, yeah."

"Do worlds have... names? Trade routes? Do they all have the same Lights, or different ones?" asks Colborn.

"They have names, though some just have something like 'Earth' then a number, since a lot of planets are named the local word for Earth. Plenty of trade routes, though that really varies with how easy it is to get around. Many I've heard of have similar magic systems, but I think this world's is one I haven't run into - my world doesn't have Lights."

"Sounds... dark," says Colborn. "Do you have dark things?"

"Nope!"

"I guess maybe that's a tossup then."

"I think we mostly manage to have entirely our own sort of problems, yeah."

"Like what?" Signe asks.