"...can you rephrase that last bit?"

"When we first made the world, we neglected to give it a timeline. We were used to time being fairly malleable. One of the Aedra eventually became the God of Time, so things happen only once, seconds take a predictable amount of time, if two people go separate ways and meet again they will agree on how much time has passed, things happen in a set order, and you can't split and choose between timelines, or have two timelines both happen - a coin can only flip heads or tails, not simultaneously both."

"...I can sort of imagine the other stuff but what would it mean for a second to take unpredictable amounts of time? A second is an amount of time."

"Synchronization. A second for you is a second for me. If I went somewhere with unpredictable time flows, a second for you could be a year for me. Most places are stable enough such that anything you're interacting with is in the same time frame as you, but not everywhere is, and our world had some more chaotic pockets. Mortals have internal senses of time and apparently dislike it when that doesn't line up with the world around them."

"So that's actually the same as the one about agreeing on how much time has passed, okay. ...Bar says that if we go someplace we can't see each other in here we could desync."

"Interesting. Is there a pattern to that?"

"She says people are more likely to find it convenient than not but that might be because if it goes an undesirable way the faster party can go find the slower."

"That seems likely. I doubt I'll be bothered by not being synchronized with people, but I'm also both immortal and patient."

"That must be nice."

"I don't actually know how to make arbitrary mortals into immortals; that might be an interesting project for here, especially without other et'Ada around to get annoyed at me for it..."

"Ooh, really?"

"I should be able to - I can make mortals immortal while they're in my Realm, which no one else cares about enough to try to stop me doing. The question then becomes how to do that so it follows someone outside my Realm."

"Is it something you have to actively maintain?"

"That's a bit complicated? I'm not spending attention on keeping people immortal, but the spell I set up to do that doesn't work outside a narrow range of conditions. Those conditions are present in my Realm, but not elsewhere. I do also have to actively resurrect someone who died of violence. I think the God of Madness has automated resurrections, though, so it's possible to do."

"When you say a 'spell' what does that mean? What are the conditions?"

"A spell is a pattern of how you shape magicka - the energy that flows from the plane of Aetherius and fuels magic - in order to have a specific, consistent effect. It's like how a word is a specific sound with a specific meaning. The conditions involve an ability to access ambient magicka, as well as that ambient magicka being already a certain shape - like a background noise. I could set those conditions up elsewhere, but making the spell not need them, and therefore be location-independent, would be harder."

"Yeah, I imagine if there were ambient magic of that kind where I live we might have noticed."

"It's fairly obvious to me when it's present, but I might have an advantage in sensing it."

"Well, does my magic run on it or is it different?"

"Different."

"So either there's something like your system doing nothing obvious on top of my more conspicuous primacy or we just don't have magicka and the second seems likelier to me."

"To me as well."

"Would that make it a lot harder?"

"That your world doesn't have magicka? Possibly."

"Drat."