(It's surprising how fast you can become blasé to this kind of thing.  Haroun is hardly shocked out of his undergarments at all.)

"Again lasted only a little while."

"That's genuinely odd and I have nothing in particular to explain it.  I guess that means you could spam 『Flash』 to blind monsters?  You're already like five times the adventurer I'd be."

"What are you studying fire magic and whatnot for, anyway?" Last body is hauled in; she shuts the door.

"It's a necessary base for a lot of skill trees having to do with alchemy.  Not what you'd call combat-efficient, but few tier-1 subjects are, and I wasn't planning on being an adventurer.  My dungeon runs have all been escorted and paid for."

Haroun climbs back into the driver's seat.  The carriage creaks back into motion.

"Which you do because you get skills faster when you - oh, for fuck's sake."

"?" Haroun says in Lictic.  (You can literally just utter the question-mark in that language.)

That's a really cool feature of Lictic actually but on the other hand. "Uh.

Imagine if you will that you want to invent a game about being an adventurer in a world kinda like this one, but you live in my world where skills aren't discrete magic-y things. You want to have the characters that your players control get stronger over time so they can do more stuff, but you don't want everybody who plays the game to get stronger in the exact same way every time, that kills your replay value and customization and being able to make them do teamwork, yeah? But you want it possible to gauge approximately how strong a character is to match them to appropriate plot events, or at least how strong they could be if they were behaving efficiently, plus you want playing the game to be faster than living someplace for a decade, so instead of using Earth-style abilities and skills that are continuous and messy and forgettable and slow and whatnot, instead you make imaginary, discrete versions of skills, and assign within the game numerical difficulties to various tasks so you can see whether a given character can achieve those things yet. And since you want them to get stronger over time, and to complete some kind of plot that gets harder over time, you give them rewards, such as skill-ups, for doing plot type stuff, such as defeating monsters."

Haroun is going to need Bella to expand on a number of these concepts.

"I really am trying here, sorry -" She can go into more detail on how RPGs work.

"So you're saying that your world sort of... spontaneously reinvented my world as a game?  Wait, didn't you say God said something about that to you?  I'm not sure I'm remembering correctly what you said God said."

"Uh -" This is what writing things down is for. "He said I was from a higher world and that things should be approximately as I expected given the thing with the demon lord and then he seemed confused I didn't know as much as he expected me to. But maybe I'd know as much as he expected me to if I'd played some particular game. Or possibly a genre of them. I'm not aware of a specific game that's like this."

"I wonder what makes your world higher than my world if it's not full of ultrapowerful adventurers with a million mana.  But, I mean, my world seems pretty sensible to me so it's not surprising that somebody trying to make up a sensible game would end up there?"

"I don't know what 'higher' is getting at either, sorry, though I'm pretty sure I have the word right because it appears twice in my writeup. Your world doesn't seem very sensible to me at all - like, there are fantasy worlds from books I could have landed in that would have seemed outlandish but not weird, but the thing with respawning monsters that grant - in a game it'd be called 'experience points' - and the whole skills situation, that seems ultra weird."

"Well, not every Summoned Hero goes around killing all the kings who allowed slave collars.  So you might not all be from the same place.  And God said you came from a higher world rather than the higher world, right?  What I'm getting at is that my world doesn't seem so crazy to me that you wouldn't expect there to be a world like that.  And I'd expect there to be a world out there that invented something similar to our ecology as a game.  If there's, like, thousands of worlds out there, it could practically be a certainty.  I mean, sure, some aspects of my world might strike you as odd, but how is that any different from the aspects of your world that would strike me as odd?  Why is it less weird for killing monsters to not make Skills increase faster?"

"I don't have firm plans to kill any kings, and different people in different places and times in my world would have different attitudes anyway, there's billions of us. I -

Do you have a reason to expect it would be a bad idea for me to explain what gravity is, I think that might be illustrative?"

"You'd know better than I would whether it's weaponizable knowledge, and, er, I sort of know a lot of dangerous things already, like who you are?  I was thinking more that it's the kind of knowledge that marks you as an enormous walking anomaly."

"Gravity is a force that draws all physical objects towards each other proportionally to the product of their mass and inversely proportionally to the square of the distance between them."

Haroun is proud of himself for knowing enough mathematics to understand this on the first try!  "Why doesn't any pair of -"  He realizes his mistake a second later.  "Right, if something the size of a whole planet draws things downward at a rate slow enough to be livable, it'd take something the size of a mountain before you could notice any draw towards it at all!  And you'd probably just mistake it for a slightly different slope of the land, I mean, I can't think offhand of any standard measurement of 'downwards' except the direction gravity pulls.  If the mountain is pulling you towards it, it would just appear as the ground there being a little less steep!  You'd have to get a sextant and a clock and start calibrating by the location of the stars in order to get a different fix on directions than that!"

"I'm not sure I even know what a sextant is. I don't think mountains make a big difference but maybe they do? I suppose your planet could be smaller than mine.

Anyway, I was talking about physics earlier? Gravity is I think the easiest one to describe but there are only a handful of fundamental forces and they're all approximately like that. Basic mathy rules that apply the same way to all the little bits that everything is made of. That's all we've got. Little bits, simple forces. If gravity matches maybe you also have little bits and simple forces. But then you also have spontaneous dungeons and magic spells and experience points."

If gravity falls off as the square of the distance, considering how far away most of the planet is from him, Haroun doesn't see the total being strong enough to pull on him as hard as gravity does, while a mountain right there exerts no detectable force at all.  This should definitely be testable, and then they can see if the rules are the same for his world and Bella's world!

He's not sure he understands the second half of her argument, though.  "You don't look to me like you're made out of little bits and simple forces.  You've got... hair, and a nose, and I'd go on except that I'd start to sound like a creepy stalker."

"The little bits are very small. You need a microscope to see cells, which a human has trillions of, and a very fancy microscope to see the littlest bits."

"So why couldn't dungeon cores, monsters, and Skills be made out of little bits too?"

"Uh, they can be and prob- well, Skills don't seem likely to be but the others may. But them appearing and respawning is weird, it requires extra stuff going on. And it requires the stuff that's going on to kind of - have regard for larger bits, like 'a monster' or 'your knowledge of knitting'."

"I'm not sure I understand what it looks like to live in a reality that has no regard for larger bits of things.  Nothing respects your having hair?"