"I meant no insult!" Dodge ball of lava. "I don't intend to interfere, you said no!" Dodge house-sized spear of ice. "I'm leaving peacefully, okay, so stop tearing up the tile!"
"You'll respawn at home. No permanent damage. You interrupted an important meeting, you need to learn a lesson about territory, mountain bitch." Dodge- no, fail to dodge a thrown tree, and then another ice ball. The next sphere of magma is what destroyed that form.
She wakes up, stripped of all her tools and enchantments and even clothes, and groans in pain.
"So you said it was flat. How does that work? How large is it, what's under it and above it?"
"There are separate continents, more of them as far as you can go. Ocean, plains, forest, mountain. In between is just nothing. At least as far as anyone where I lived could tell. The one I lived on was maybe a hundred by by a hundred and sixty tiles, irregular edges. Er, a tile... The world comes in square pieces, each square is made of four triangles pointing to the middle. They were about... Three or four miles long?"
"They're... what, floating in the middle of nowhere? Where does stuff come from? Is it just endlessly generated? And why are there square pieces, what's important about them?"
Yeah, floating in the middle of nothing. Vela like me, make all the stuff. Stuff is most efficiently made in those square pieces, and only square pieces latch on to the- grid, I guess, and don't fall. But Legend told me not to try it here.
"I know, it's just. Wow." They shake their head very quickly at if to clear it. "Anyway, what's a Vela?"
"Yeah. But when you achieve something sufficiently grand, I guess my world decides you deserve more."
"It just happens. Mine was a large, automated, safe underground transport grid. A bit like the subways. Some other famous examples are the stormveil, which prevents tornadoes from touching down over a few dozen squares and directs lightning strikes to harmless areas. Or the wardwall, an anti-volcano shield over an entire city. Big feats of our equivalent of engineering, which this world would call magic."
"That... sounds pretty amazing. Where does weather come from? Have you ever flown below a square to see what's there? What keeps the squares up? Is there a sky?"
"I can't remember five questions while multitasking. There is nothing below the squares, we've looked with telescopes and scries. I've flown a few tiles down but it really is just empty. There is a sky, people have been determined enough to go visit it. Seems like there is a separate grid for suns and moons and stars a really long way up, and it's just as empty beyond that as below the surface."
"Suns are pretty big. They're spheres of fire... We don't understand our world as well as people understand this one."
"Are they embedded on something? What does this grid even do? How does it separate? Does it correspond to the earth grid?"
"The grid is what we call whatever-stuff-sticks-to. It's not detectable except by how stuff sticks to it - no light, no physical substance. Stuff falls off grids sometimes, especially after disasters or battles, or when it was uneven in the first place. I think the two grids are arranged differently, but falling stars are totally a thing. I've never seen a sun fall, but it's said to have happened. Ancient history."
"That sounds... really fascinating. I mean, it sounds so made up, but, magic, and flat lands, and stuff. I'm not even sure what I'm talking about anymore, I have a bunch of questions still but they can mostly be summarized by 'tell me literally everything about everything' which is not a helpful way to phrase it."
"Ha! Not really, no. I'm about done with what I planned to do today anyway. Maybe you'll have coherent questions if you come back tomorrow. Good luck for whenever you pick a fight with villains who deserve the label more than you."
"If you do the work of finding the villains for me I just might do that. Try not to destroy things just because you know I'm going to fix them if you can avoid it, though?"
Mountain calls the city officials to update them on her progress, and emails that picture to the journalist, and asks Laura for an update on the internet-and-electricity for her mountain thing.