Someone with rainbow light playing across her skin and clothes walks in the door, turns around to look behind her, steps out and then back in (keeping the door open), furrows her brow, summons a quick light, and says, apparently to herself, "Interesting. This isn't a realm of Oblivion."

The room through the still open door is entirely white or clear crystals, lit by soft green orbs. The woman closes the door, tilting her head, and opens it again, to the same room.

"...should it be? What is that?"

"I was in a Realm of Oblivion, and usually when there's unexpected connections to another Realm it's within that sphere. Oblivion is a set of planes. I'm unsure where this place is, though."

"The bar - who is a person - says it's called Milliways. Oh, uh, stand a bit back from me, in a five foot radius I involuntarily read minds."

"Does that count for any body part, or just the seat of consciousness? How do you define 'minds' here? Do you get surface thoughts, or memories, or someone's sensory input..."

"If you stick my hand in your range I can still read it. Surface thoughts and attended-to sensory input, involuntarily; I can do more than that but only on purpose."

"Interesting." She closes her door again. "Is that sort of power common here?"

"I don't know about Milliways but at home no, very rare. One person at a time for each of five power types, and they manifest a little differently."

"Interesting. Magic is very common where I'm from, but most people cannot peer into another's mind. You're not from Milliways, then?"

"I'm not sure anyone is, besides the bar. I got here the same way you did. What's your magic do?"

"For myself - I control light, and I have effectively absolute power over the Colored Rooms, a Realm of Oblivion that I made. I can grant mortals powers, briefly, and forge artifacts, as well as view and speak within the areas around my temples and devoted worshipers from afar. For my world - magic's ultimate expression created our universe. Most mortals manage fairly minor spells - healing, illusions, and conjuration of spirits or beings from outside their Realm."

"That's a whole lot of things. Mortals? You aren't a mortal?"

"No. Many beings in Oblivion aren't."

"What are you instead?"

"The official category is et'Ada, those spirits who predate our universe, Aurbis. I am one of the more powerful ones, and as such mortals consider me a Daedric Prince - loosely, Daedra are those et'Ada who did not participate in the making of the universe, and the Princes are the most powerful of them, although I am not technically a Daedra. The other two types of et'Ada are Aedra and Magna-Ge, and I am of that last group. The Aedra gave much of their power in making the universe. The Magna-Ge are those who gave some of our power and then left the project. Mortals sometimes name some of us gods, as well."

"Why are you considered a Daedric Prince if you aren't a Daedra?"

"Most Magna-Ge left Aurbis, so it's not a category mortals are very familiar with. The Aedra have their own interwoven politics and alliances and do not keep their Realms in Oblivion. The Daedra have no such alliances, and most rule within Oblivion."

"Gosh. My world doesn't seem to have gods, as far as I know. In my country we have a king, and five primes, associated with the five elements and the five aspects of people. I'm the sweela prime, fire and mind."

"Interesting. Do other countries have primes, too?"

"As far as I know they don't have anything like us."

"Do you know why?"

"No."

"How does your fire primacy manifest?"

"Do you mean what happened when I got it or what can I do?"

"The second, though the first would be interesting to know, as well."

"I have the involuntary mindreading at a short radius. I can also do other things to people's minds on purpose, though I'm very nervous about it and only do it when the alternatives are all really bad. Over a much wider area I have pretty arbitrary control of temperature and I can create and extinguish and control fire."

"Interesting. I would like to know how your powers compare against mine, sometime, but I would be hesitant about the impact reading my mind might have on a mortal, and this does not seem a place to test fire control."

"I mean, it's not going to go out of control." She holds out her hand and a little orange flame dances in her palm.

She nods. "Interesting. It seems to be an ordinary fire, to my senses. What is the definition of 'fire' your powers operate under? Does it include all plasmas?"

"Plasmas?"

She explains the states of matter, and that some especially hot fires are the same sort of matter stage as lightning, and a few other natural phenomena - technically lower heat, gaseous fires are more a product of continual chemical reactions, rather than being a particular state of matter...

"I... don't feel like I can do things that aren't fire, but maybe if I heated it up enough it'd technically be some of these other things?"

"That's reasonable; magic in my world sometimes also - interacts with a physical reality in a representational way. Is the definition of fire then a natural language one? If you can't control chemical reactions that produce heat in general."

"I mean, I can control heat in general... I don't know what the chemicals would then tend to do about it."

"Might be something to test, then, especially once I have a better sense of this place."

"Sure, take your time, I'm going to be here for a while most likely."

She nods. "I think I have some questions for Bar, first."

Can I interest you in a free first drink?

"Sure," she says, smiling. "Though I'm curious what, in general, is free or charged for, and what sort of currency do you accept?"

I am obliged to quote prices for everything other than the first drink, napkins, plain water, and incidentals like straws. I can accept any currency and price things in whatever is convenient to my patrons.

"Reasonable. I'll have to think about what would be convenient to me - I do have some coins people have left me as offerings, but there might be something easier... And do you charge for information about how Milliways works? I have some questions about how it interacts with my home universe."

The conversation is free. What would you like to know?

"Thank you. What's happening when the door is shut?"

Nothing, most likely. Patrons typically find that time is stopped in their universes while they visit Milliways and the door is not open to that universe.

She nods. "Are there ways to undo the pausing other than opening the door?"

Some relatively unusual effects can accomplish this. I do not know you to have access to any, but would not necessarily be aware.

"I can interact with my temples, Realms, and worshipers if I feel like it, even without colocating places, which seems it would at least do something interesting."

It may. I can see if any forthcoming publications from your world become available to mark time but don't have any more direct means of doing so.

"I could also ask a follower to mark time themselves, between contact attempts, assuming contact works in the first place."

She stares into the distance, reaching - seeing what happens when she tries to view her Realm.

"I can renew time in my own Realm, but it doesn't automatically propagate to the other Realm I have access to, and I think when I stop looking time pauses again," she says after a few moments. "This bears experimenting with, eventually. Is there a limit to how long someone can stay here?" she asks Bar.

You are welcome indefinitely, though many patrons find their stay limited by their budget.

"Thank you. I might have to get creative with sourcing septims - I don't have a currency set up per se in the Colored Rooms - but I don't anticipate a strong problem, there."

You may also choose to run a tab.

"Are there any drawbacks to that that you know of?"

Some patrons prefer not to for approximately superstitious reasons but I have no confirmatory pattern of evidence to report.

"I might run a tab briefly, then, but I prefer not staying in debt, generally."

Many patrons feel the same way.

She nods. "I might have more questions later, but for now I think my initial curiosity's satisfied."

"Anything interesting?"

"I seem to be able to pause and unpause my own Realm and anywhere else I could typically far-view at will, and I can have my Realm unpaused without unpausing the rest of my universe, which certainly has numerous advantages. That has been the main discovery so far."

"Is that substantially more useful than just having everything paused but you?"

"Some experiments take time to run, separately from me working on them, or are easier to run in my own Realm, and it allows me to have the inhabitants of my Realm unpaused as well, without necessarily uprooting them."

"Experiments? What kind of experiments?"

"I'm mostly investigating the effects of different ways of setting up my Realm, but I'm also investigating some of the finer details of chemistry and physics, especially in interactions with what I would term magic. This is slightly hampered by my home universe having been primarily made by people who think magical power is a good enough patch for not understanding how anything actually works, so I'm also poking at the results of that, to see if anything can be improved, especially if I ever get the chance to direct the creation of a universe proper."

"Is that the sort of opportunity that comes up more than once?"

"Very rarely, and only one person involved in our universe had ever directly witnessed the creation of one before, and he was dishonest about many details of the process. There were accordingly mistakes made."

"Dishonest about... what exactly?"

"Our world required a significant expenditure of power to make - enough that several of us died or were greatly diminished. I think that some small level of power expenditure is naturally required with our methods, but that it was greatly increased by our inexperience and impatience. Instead of creating a world that would in time develop to be something like what we wanted, we tried to make an exact, grand vision immediately."

"Where were you from before making the new world?"

"I came into being in another universe, as a - sort of accidental pattern that emerged from primordial chaos."

"Are your, uh, co-workers also from there?"

"Not for the most part, but a few were."

"Where were the rest from?"

"Other worlds, I think mostly similar to my own, but many had instead been made deliberately by someone. People's origins weren't a frequent topic of gossip, though."

"Huh, if I were on a world development project I'd want to know all about where I could be taking inspiration from."

"Yes. Apparently I'm off putting, though, and I'm one of the more thorough of our kind. The more pro-social of us were more open, though, and the primary architect Magnus was very open and explicit about worlds he'd seen - but he quit midway through, and that ruined a lot of the air of cooperation."

"Why'd he quit?"

"He hadn't known either about the world requiring us to sacrifice power, and he felt that was an unacceptable cost, especially since he felt tricked by the only one of us who had known about that, Lorkhan."

"What was Lorkhan's deal?"

"He wanted the world to be made, and didn't think we'd do it if we knew the cost."

"Wanted it for what?"

"He never said. Several of the others killed him in their anger, so I didn't get a chance to try to tease the answer out."

"How did the lot of you get enough - uh, is 'power' here a thing on its own or should I be imagining it as skills with various kinds of magic or what - how did you all get the ability to contribute to making worlds?"

"I didn't acquire it as a separate thing. Lorkhan seemed to believe we all simply had that capability, regardless of our lack of experience with actually doing anything of the sort. What we could actually contribute varied widely; some of us were powerful enough to carve our own small planes, while others had to pool the effort of hundreds or thousands for their own little corner."

"Where did you get the ability?"

"For the skill, I figured it out as I was going. I don't know where I got the actual technical power, or if I ever didn't have it."

"Huh. What does it mean to be an accidental pattern -"

"If there's enough random chaos, some of it can at least briefly form coherent patterns just on pure luck. Things in that world happened entirely randomly if there was no intelligence around to guide them - I was essentially the result of several trillion rolls of the cosmic dice turning up lucky, and I was intelligent enough then to form my own patterns and influence my surroundings, allowing me to sustain my own existence."

"...huh. Can you rephrase 'pattern'?"

"Discrete concept, object, shape, being, image... 'Pattern' is fairly generic. Somewhat - if you wove a tapestry by selecting threads at random, and you kept weaving for eternity, eventually you'd get an image in it that looked like at least the outline of a person. Every discrete thing you can identify in the tapestry is a pattern in the underlying threads."

"Okay, but the outline-looking thing in the pattern wouldn't then move around."

"And then if you arranged the fundamental pieces of the universe at random - and you did this for eternity - eventually you'd get an object, existing in three dimensions, that has a mind and a body and can move. Minds are an emergent property where I'm from; you could say something similar enough to something that has a mind will begin to think on its own."

"You'd need - not just the mind and the body - also the conditions for it to stay alive in - for every mind that randomly started existing, only a tiny fraction of those can have survived -"

"I think most minds were more self-sustaining, in that world, but - yes. I don't know how many were lost."

"Self-sustaining? How?"

"The world was morphic, and responded to thoughts, so you could create an environment suitable for you, and keep it from being subject to the chaos. While you were paying attention, at least."

"How would a new mind know what it needed?"

"I had some instinct for it, but I don't know that everyone did."

"Does your original universe still exist?"

"I think so, but I haven't interacted with it, even indirectly, in millennia."

"Wasn't there anything interesting there?"

"There was, but traveling between universes is difficult for me, especially if I want to keep attention on my Realm - and running the Realm often takes up the bulk of my time. It's not something I can easily take a vacation from."

"What's involved in running your Realm?"

"Keeping the borders with the rest of Oblivion stable. Countering moves that the Daedric Princes unfriendly to me make to intrude on my territory. Diplomacy with the Daedric Princes neutral to me. Answering the requests and prayers of adherents. Keeping an eye on events in the mortal realm, and passing on relevant information to my priests. Passing on scientific information to my priests, and ensuring that the educations given to adherents are scientifically accurate. Making sure that when my adherents die their souls come to my Realm as they should, rather than being stolen - which sometimes involves fighting other gods and requires fairly constant vigilance - and then reembodying those whose souls I have collected. Sometimes I need to work with someone who has become dissatisfied with their body to change it. Also, sometimes someone desecrates one of my shrines, and I need to coordinate a response to that, or I need to guide someone in the consecration of a new shrine."

"There's also some other assorted tasks - for instance, I forced a fort into the Realm of Molag Bal, one of my enemies who's prone to torturing the souls he collects or steals. Currently it's mostly meant as a safe place to flee to; I can move anyone who makes it to the fort into my Realm. Molag Bal sometimes attacks the fort, and then I usually have to send a piece of myself to defend it."

"Sounds busy. What does consecration do?"

"It makes it easier for me to act in an area outside of my Realm. I'm connected to all my consecrated places, and can view, listen, and speak there, though I have trouble manifesting physically."

"Like you can't or like it's hard or like it's costly?"

"It's hard. I don't believe those of us who have managed the trick find it costly."

"What are the - regular people, I guess - who live in your world like?"

"There's many types of mortals. Elves, humans, Argonians, and Khajiit usually make themselves the most relevant. They all live on land, and have roughly the same body plan. Elves are a bit taller than humans and live longer, and they usually have more talent for magic. Argonians are a lizard-like people, and they're tied culturally to the Hist, which is a distributed organism - they're a single plant-like being that's very large, and spread over a large root network with trees emerging into the air. I haven't gotten a chance to speak to the Hist, but the Hist is apparently intelligent. Argonians themselves are much like humans in being unique individuals, though. They can breathe underwater and prefer to live in swamps. The Khajiit are a cat-like people. Their morphology is determined by the phases of the moons at their birth - a person who looks very like a human with a few cat-like features could give birth to a tiger, if the moons were right."

"In my own realm, there are the restored souls of mortals, as well as the lesser daedra that serve me - they can change their own forms, but have little ability to alter a Realm, unless thousands of them worked together."

"What interests them in serving you?"

"I provide them a safe place, away from the more violent daedra, in a Realm that's to their liking, and if they're destroyed I'll remake them."

"Makes sense. What's going on with the violent daedra?"

"Some are easily bored. Some are sadists. Some simply enjoy destroying things. Many or even most daedra lack a concept of other people being morally important, and the more powerful ones don't find they need societies to protect them, so it's relatively rare for them to bother being pro-social about their hobbies."

"Why were they even invited to the new world?"

"It was more that rumor spread we were trying something, and whoever showed up had a chance to argue themselves onto the committee. Also the et'Ada generally care less about people curbing destructive impulses than mortals do. It's hard to permanently kill us, and extremely difficult to trap us, so what we can do to each other is limited."

"Was it anticipated at the time that there would be mortals?"

"I didn't anticipate that. Some people had a few ideas for them, I believe. No one really understood they'd be fragile, and that they'd just wear out as time went on was a surprise. They didn't even actually do that when the world first existed, though it hadn't occurred to us yet to make a single, overarching frame for time to operate in, which might've had something to do with that."

"...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."

"Neither does this place, though, and as your world's currently paused and time de-synchronization is apparently often convenient, I might have the problem solved by the time you decide to go back, especially if you don't mind being a test subject."

"I'd really like to be immortal. Though depending on the possible side effects it might be irresponsible."

"How so?"

"When I die the primacy will pass to a relative of mine. Being immortal would be great, especially if I could share it around, but being mortal and failing to pass on the primacy wouldn't."

"And no one in your world's died and been resurrected before?"

"No."

"I think the failure mode of you being mortal and not passing on the primacy is unlikely, but for your world's Primes specifically I might want to put the extra effort into making you hard to kill, versus merely unaging - it's usually more difficult than it's worth, given it's possible to resurrect people within my Realm."

"I haven't had that many assassination attempts! But I am clumsy. And get almost a normal number of diseases."

"Accidents are harder to solve than disease, unfortunately."

"I guess that makes sense."

"It should still be possible, but it'll take more time to figure out."

"I'd really like that. If you feel like making a near stranger immortal."

"I don't give people powers I can't counter, and it'll be a valuable experiment, besides."

"Wouldn't you have to go home with me to counter it or have any information about whether you'd want to?"

"I can create multiple bodies for my mind to inhabit, so will probably dedicate one to wandering through other people's doors anyways. I'm unsure if I'll be able to remained synced even across universes, but I'm willing to have a fork stranded as part of the experiment."

"What would you... do, in my world?"

"Explore and ask questions, mostly, and then see if it's easier for one of my bodies to return to my universe than it is for me to leave."

"What kinds of questions?"

"Similar to what I was asking you, somewhat, as well as culture, history, social, political... I like learning things."

"That makes sense. There's a translation effect here, though, I assume you don't really speak Welchin."

"Learning the language will be interesting as well."

"Are you faster at that than a human?"

"I believe so, though I haven't often been challenged - I simply keep up with languages in the mortal world as they develop. My memory's perfect, though."

"That'd help a lot."

"I suspect it would."

"Probably if I'm going to wander off to try working on the spell, we should set how often we try to contact each other? In case one of us is faster than the other. I'm also going to want some ex-mortals from my Realm..."

"Every... week? I'm planning to be here a while."

"How many days is that in your culture?"

"Ten."

"Every ten days works for me, then."

"I suppose days might also not be the same." She makes some mental transaction with Bar and comes up with a room key. "I'm in 265, apparently."

"Right. I'll find out my number, then."

She goes up to Bar.

"I'd like a suite suitable for experimenting with magic in, and for multiple mortals to be able to inhabit, please," she says.

49021. Key. The charge is by subjective day for whoever experiences having access to the room longest.

"Thank you. I'll put it on credit, and pay it off whenever I come down."

She takes the key and relays the room number to Kiri.

Kiri writes it down.

"Do you have other questions for me, before I start working on this?"

"Don't think so but if I come up with something I can always find you early."

"Right. Good luck, then."

"Thanks!"

She nods, and turns to the stairs. (She'll get some of her ex-mortals, later, once she's done the ground work on the spell...)

(She's going to have quite the busy time of it.)