"That seems like it would play badly with making the ecology suitable for nonhuman creatures. Unless they have magic that lets them eat weird stuff."

"They have magic for growing plants, if you don't want to have human-food-bearing plants around where the animals are they'll want a garden patch but it doesn't have to be a very big one. Or I can figure something else out, there's ways to do it with magic directly, but druids like gardening and gathering mostly."

"I guess I don't know what people in your world eat but here the plants humans have domesticated are usually a lot tastier even to many kinds of animals than whatever they consume in the wild."

"-oh. No, druids'll eat wild plants just fine. Most people from my world will."

"Huh. Uh, we have winter here... sorry, I don't know what if anything might turn out to be really important. People mostly just buy food in this universe. Maybe we'll give them a stipend and they can donate to charity if they turn out not to need it."

"That sounds like a good way to do it. Or I might be able to pair you up with a druid circle that wants your world's money for something, once they know about you, and your druids can get food from them if they need to. Is there anything else you'd want in a druid? Favorite kind of animal, hobbies, skills, anything like that? If you're getting young ones it won't be too hard to find ones that don't have companions yet - druids and rangers will bond with a specific animal on top of their usual connection with nature, and they'll follow each other around and work together especially well. It's handy for a breeding project especially, a lot of mamas are touchy about humans around their babies but a druid's companion will usually let them come around."

"For this specific project marsupial fans would be good but since we want to go mixed in the long run we're working with a bird conservator foundation and so somebody into emus or keas or something would also be fine. Uh, surfing is popular regionally? - oh, uh, regarding living off the land. They can't go kill animals to eat unless they like eating bugs. We don't do that here. If they want meat they have to get it from a store where it will have been grown or conjured."

She nods. "That'll put a limit on it but not much, my druids aren't usually big on hunting. If they're getting food from my world will you mind if they get meat from there? We don't have all the stuff you do, we need to hunt for population control sometimes, but I can tell them not to bring it here if it'll bother people."

"It'll bother people, yeah."

"All right. I am gonna fix us up - or try, anyway, the god of the wilds is bigger than I am and he's not going to like this - but Shining One wants me to wait, he's trying to figure out how to let our world know about yours without causing too many problems."

"...he won't like it? Uh, is it safe to try it, then, that kind of makes it sound like I should scrap the project and go take that job at the vet practice..."

"He couldn't get a foothold here if he tried, the only wild places you have left at all are at the bottom of the ocean and, like, space. That's why I think I can beat him, he's huge at home but I can spread out all over the place here. He might send some druids or something anyway but that's the kind of problem Shining One is trying to solve. And he wouldn't go after you, anyway, he hates cities way more than this kind of thing."

"- he'd go after cities?"

"If he was gonna do anything here, yeah, probably. I don't think he will if we're careful, most of the time if you leave him alone it's fine. We don't have cities as big as you do but we have cities at all, and he leaves them be."

"...possibly you should be talking to some kind of defense organization. About whether probably is good enough."

"Shining One would be better at that than I am but if you think it's important."

"Uh, I don't know if you'd add anything he doesn't but maybe make sure he's on it? Ganymede was bad enough."

"He's real busy right now but he definitely won't forget about the Piper, he's one of the biggest gods we have. I guess I might know a little more than he does about some stuff but he'll ask me if he needs to."

"How are you... sizes?"

"Gods are all about things, and the more common or important the things we're about are the bigger we are. Shining One is about the sun, which is super important for life, and healing and communities and moral strength, which are all really big deals, so he's a really big powerful god. The Archmage is about magic, which is everywhere and in everything and, like, holds the world together just about, so he's really big and powerful. And the gods of the common species of people are really big that way too, but a little smaller. And my world has a lot of places that are just totally wild, no people living there at all or only druids, so the Piper is really big. And I'm all about people and nature working together, and that's not as common, it's easier for people to just domesticate what they need and let nature do its own thing, so I'm a lot smaller than that. Except here it's different, you're doing all kinds of stuff with your natural places."

"So you having found us makes you bigger? ...I don't think magic holds this world together."

"Your world is really different, yeah. And I'm not bigger yet but if I stick around I can grow here."

"Huh. Are there going to be new gods about things you don't have like computers?"

"Yeah, but not very soon unless we do something about it."

"...do something about it?"