"Ah..." She shakes her head. She can't claim it's the worst thing she's ever heard of, but frankly there's no comparing tragedies like that, anyway. There's nothing really to say in response to that which isn't trite, so she latches onto another topic instead. 

"Your world has magic besides your gods'?" 

He takes a moment to consider that fully.  "I'm not sure.  At least some of the different magics are created by a god.  I know that Diamondeye creates and empowers mages, and was able to change some aspects of how our magic worked after an exploit was found in it.  I assumed that whatever exploit they used had been something like that, or maybe a combination of using magic with technology.  Would it make more sense for there to be both god-created magic systems and natural ones?"

She shrugs, "I've seen worlds with both." She thinks back to one of the worlds in question fondly, and then shakes her head, "And I've seen worlds where it turned out they all ran on the same system, and ones where the gods were actually just very powerful magic users, and ones where what the magic users thought were gods were actually just concepts attached to the magic... the list goes on." 

He's fascinated by the different places and wants to hear about them all!

It's also making him curious about where Tle would fall into things.  Many of the possible theories would look the same from his perspective, and he's not sure what tests would turn out differently depending on which one was true.  Is that something that The Wanderer's kind of god can tell by looking?

Not exactly. She can tell just by looking how difficult something or someone would be to change, and usually has some idea of why - the more magical something or someone is the harder it will be, with a few exceptions. Gods are usually at the highest end of that, though extremely powerful magic users can reach that point, too. In the past she'd often found out the truth of it from the people she encountered in a world, or even from the gods directly. Being a strange god in a world with gods can draw their attention. 

She's happy to tell him about them! She'd actually been to three worlds with the concept-gods before she found out about that - she'd thought they were just very non-interventionist, outside those specific rituals which called on them. The people there had external souls, which, for most of them, took the form of animals... 

She can spend hours - more than hours - talking about places she's visited, though she's also very curious about his own world. 

He orders another drink, then can talk about the things that immediately come to mind about Tle.  

There are a few species wandering around.  Humans he'd mentioned, and merfolk in the oceans with their caste-like divisions between genders and age groups.  Dryads - plant people who travel around the world as archaeologists and explorers until they grow too large and plant themselves in a Grove.  Groves are their cities, created out of and run by the combined minds of all dryads who make them up.  Dryads are the youngest species, having only been created after humanity's fall.  Solon - tentacled people known for their complex systems of etiquette.  Solon are relatively new as well, brought from another world by the gods less than a thousand years ago.  The gods themselves, if they count as a species, and their children.  With sapient species, a half-god is otherwise their mortal parent's kind but with wings.  With animals, the resulting offspring are larger, sapient, and usually have some unique trait like strange coloration or extra limbs.  

Technology continues to advance.  Places where people live are wired with electricity, running televisions and factories and various machines that have replaced household tasks.  The last time he'd been in civilization, everyone had been talking about a dryad who had been sent into space.  There are apparently plans forming to land briefly on one of the moons.  

He also mentions his own job.  Ara'Vine is a mage, whose mage-power of healing and shapeshifting is especially useful for medical research and creating new cultivars of plants.  It takes a long time to build up enough magic to do anything, meaning he spends most of his time out in the wilderness.  He used to handle the plant and vaccine creation himself, but between the Groves' intelligence, memory, and attention capacity it's now more efficient for him to just hand them chargestones filled with his mage-power every so often.  

There seems to be humans just about everywhere! She's curious about the ones in his world - he'd mentioned that the population was small but stable, what kind of numbers does that imply, do they all live in one area or are they spread out? 

Wandering around learning about history sounds like a good way to live, to her. Are the older dryads happy in their groves? If they don't want to plant themselves, can they stop it somehow? Does he know why the Solons were brought to his world?

Her kind of god doesn't have 'demigod' children - they're either mortal or they're gods themselves, and making a godly child takes a lot of power. The more aquatic species' demigods would have wings too? Her own wings don't get waterlogged, and she's figured out how to use them to aid in swimming, but regular wings would be very inconvenient!

Oh, the space age! She's only run into two worlds that were past that point in development, she'd spent centuries in one of them, exploring the cosmos, before a companion had gotten a door to Milliways. She could have spent centuries more there, otherwise, working with their exploration corps. 

Mages have limited amounts of magic? He'd mentioned that Diamondeye created that system, was there a reason for the limits she'd placed on it? That might tell him something about magic in his world in general. 

Raen'Vine's not sure exactly how many humans there are.  Maybe a million, but he could be off by an order of magnitude for all he knows.  There's a small city in/near each Grove, and a few smaller outskirt settlements heading farther away.

Dryads have a few options, though none are great.  They grow constantly, and their minds and memories are decentralized throughout their entire bodies.  If they don't want to plant themselves, they can cut themselves in half and become two smaller dryads with half of the original's mind each.  They can also cut off pieces and send them to be grafted to a grove.  They have some control over where each memory is, but it isn't perfect.  Oh, and at least one dryad has decided to turn an old boat into a chassis and now goes up and down one of the larger rivers.  

Merfolk have wings like flying fish or manta rays or penguins, or extra and more elaborate fins.  Even if they were given flying wings, there's only so long they could stay outside of water without suffocating.  Raen'Vine doesn't know of any fishfolk demigods - the gods really hated them up until a few centuries ago and have been distant since.  He's also never seen a dryad demigod, or any plant monsters in general.  

There does seem to be a limited amount of each magic being put into the world at a time.  This comes up in every system he knows about.  Vampires only rise if there aren't too many vampires around, pegasus won't breed until the total population is low enough no matter how far they get from the others.  There is only so much orichalcum, and only so many other artifacts lying around.  Potions take special liquid as a base, which comes slowly from certain fountains.  There can be - could have been, he corrects himself, as wizardry seems to have vanished - as many wizards as they want to share their power with but the more wizards there were the slower each one would regain mana.  That meant that sometimes there would be a few very powerful wizards, and sometimes many who could barely light candles.  

One magic system he vaguely remembers from long ago had also vanished.  It involved wrapping up poppets of herbs with a single human hair, then throwing it into a fire to cause effects to that person.  Different combinations of herbs did different things.  When the herbs were rare and gathered naturally, the magic worked consistently.  When they began being farmed, the magic was unreliable, working only so many times a day at random and often doing nothing at all.  People would forget, and after a time it would be rediscovered, to repeat the process over and over.  He assumes the god stopped... doing whatever it was they did to make magic work, at some point, but he's also never bothered testing it.  Most magics that increase or decrease someone's strength or speed or such usually make him nauseous when combined with his own power.  

Mages - there are only so many mage-hearts that can transform people into mages.  Each will regenerate 5 to 10 hours of magic in a week.  He gets 6, himself.  He's not sure what causes the slight variation there.  They can store as much as they want in chargestones, and to an extent overdraw some extra if they want to deal with some unpleasant side effects.

The boat idea is very clever! She wonders if she could help others who want to stay mobile - a Boon could probably do it, though there's no guarantee that's what they'd get if she made them one. 

It does sound like the amount of magic in his world must be limited, somehow. Only so much at a time to go around - maybe if the gods do create each system, they also only have so much magic at a time? Systems stop working - or are less powerful, at least - when more people are using them - that sounds like they each have a reservoir of magic, and once it runs out... 

"That's my guess too, regarding the magic.  Only a guess though - the Tle gods like to lie about things and give conflicting answers, on the rare occasion they'll sit down to answer questions at all.

"What are Boons?"

"Magical artifacts - I can make one per non-worshiper person. They always turn out to have an ability that will be very useful to the person they're made for in the near future, even if it's not obvious how at first. The powers are always related to my Domain - I've gotten everything from a mask which changes your face, to a harp which alters the player's emotions to match the song, to a ring that changes your sex." 

"For anyone who doesn't worship you?" he asks, confused.  Raen'Vine is trying to keep in mind that the rules are apparently very different, but that seems even more counter-intuitive than not having a limit to how many can be made.  He wants to know more about how they work.  

"I can make more for those who do," she explains. "The magic - all our magic - runs off of belief. Not in us, necessarily - though it can be that - so much as in our Domains and Patronages. Most people only produce enough energy to reliably power one Boon. I could make more, but they'd eventually stop working if the person they belonged to didn't have enough belief in my portfolio. Meanwhile, we can power our followers' Boons off our own aura if we want to - and actual followers tend to have more of the necessary belief anyway."