"Let me call George real quick." She does this on her phone and updates him on the situation.

He waits patiently, still obviously delighted.

When she's done, she says, "Does he, uh, know how modern roads work? Since you're lower tech."

"I'm sure he'll figure it out before he makes anything. He switches to new building techniques as they're developed, in my world, unless there's some reason to use the old ones."

"All right. Well, if he wants to join us during the interview I for one would be delighted and you can tell him so."

"I don't think he'll be quite that quick, he just now figured out how to make any contact at all. At least a day or two, would be my guess."

"We can book him another day then. Any questions before we go on the set?"

"No questions. You'll have some trouble getting him to stay still long enough for something like this, though, it's very unusual for him to stop moving. But he'll talk to you if you find him on the road."

"We can follow him around with a camera if we've got to. Set's this way!"

The set has a glass coffee table supported by a glass sculpture and some soft chairs and lots of flower arrangements and very bright lights. She sits in one chair, points him at the other, points out the cameras for him to make occasional eye contact with.

She beams at a camera. "Hi there, I'm Brooklyn Windhouse and this is a very unusual guest, Raafi. Say hi, Raafi!"

He chuckles, but answers quickly enough. "Hello. It's great to be here."

"It's my privilege to welcome Raafi not just to the studio, not just to the Earth, but to the universe. Unbelievable though it may seem, he's here via magical accident from a world as different as Fairyland or Heaven, with a lot more types of people. What were you up to when you were transported, Raafi?"

"I was on my way to the mountains; I'd heard about some interesting collaboration going on between the dwarves and the goliaths, and I wanted to see if there was anything to it. I was just getting to the foothills, fell asleep under a tree, and woke up in one of your space stations."

"We've tracked that station down; it was Saratopia Station, abandoned in 2023 along with many others of the era since they were put up hastily in the post-Revelation chaos without all the design care we use today. Luckily, it wasn't flung out of the solar system since it's not in a contested orbital, and it kept all its air. And then what happened?"

"I spent a couple of days looking through it and trying to figure out where I was, and found the emergency summoning circles and figured out how to summon a fairy to get me down. Luckily I'm in the habit of keeping some trade goods with me - my world has magic items of various sorts, and I have a couple that let me keep more things with me than I can carry. The fairy dropped me off in London, which is very impressive, good architecture."

"You got very lucky, not all abandoned stations still have their emergency circles. What sorts of things did you bring with you?"

"Oh, a variety of things, you never know what's going to be valuable in a new place - pottery and jewelry and some fancy clothing and spices and so on. I gave him a few bolts of rare fabric and some seeds I'd been collecting for a friend."

"Do you think the seeds are of plants we don't have here?"

"I can't be sure, but we do seem to have some things you don't; it wouldn't surprise me."

"Like the dwarves and goliaths you mentioned."

"Mmhmm. We have dozens of mundane kinds of people. And I hear you don't have any magical beings at all, aside from daeva; they're not especially common, where I'm from, but there's lots of types, and plenty of them live on the material plane with everyone else, and some of those are people too."

"When you say material plane, what does that mean?"

"The kind of place you'd consider normal - where the humans live and things are basically like Earth. We also have realms that we call Heaven and Hell - I'm not sure how similar they are to yours, my translation magic is behaving a little strangely with your daeva terminology - and things like the elemental planes of earth and air and fire and water, and the ethereal plane that overlaps with the material plane and is where ghosts get stuck. Most of those have people living on them, too, but they're mostly not safe for humanoids without magical protection."

"Ghosts! What can you tell us about ghosts?"

"I don't know much of the technical details, I generally call in a specialist when I find a ghost that needs more than a bit of conversation and favor. But they're people who've died and not moved on to their afterlife for whatever reason, and gained some magic in the process - they can be dangerous, especially if you try to take their grave goods, but more often they just need some help with whatever's keeping them there."

"So typically people from the material plane have afterlives?"