There is a—twist in the air, a rippling distortion like the world is a blanket and someone grabbed a double fistful and wrung it out hard.

A girl falls out of it, drops a couple of feet to the ground, and lands with a definite thump. She is curled up in a tight ball and whimpering very quietly, and seems totally unaware of her surroundings. The air untwists as soon as she's clear, and nothing of the distortion remains except a faint echo of magic.

...Kaede tries to hold onto that echo while he quickly runs over to the girl. "Are you okay?"

She is unresponsive. Still curled up whimpering.

There's magic in her, too, but it's different from the magic that brought her here. Mostly. Maybe. It's complicated and unfamilliar, hard to get a read on.

Oookay he'll look at it more deeply later—did he even manage to hold that weird echo?—anyway he tries again in the two other languages he can speak.

Nope and nope. She is clearly in a lot of pain. Maybe she's just too busy to notice him.

The weird echo has slipped away by now; it was never very solid to begin with.

Okay, pain he can deal with. He spends a moment internally debating whether using a spell on her is a good idea—it'll mean he'll have to pretend to be an arcanist around her and he's gotten in the habit of pretending to be a non-mage around other people—but it's not a very long debate, and a second later words start pouring out of his mouth, balancing incantation length and spell urgency.

It's a moderately complex spell, with two parts: one, fix whatever physical injuries it can within a certain well-specified severity bracket; two, eliminate all physical pain, be it natural or magical in origin, for half an hour.

He casts.

She stops whimpering.

She stays still for a moment, then uncurls and looks around, confused and slightly nervous. When she sees Kaede, she asks him something in a totally unrecognizable language.

Ooookay, he's not super good at languages but he knows enough to know this is definitely not a language spoken anywhere he knows of. He tries the three languages he does know again, now that she's responsive.

...she looks slightly perplexed, and tries a few more languages herself, all of them as unrecognizable as the first.

Oookay, erm, he raises a hand in a universal "wait" gesture and sits down.

She waits.

Okay. So he starts another incantation—this one is longer, he has more time, and it's in plain language to be as cheap as possible. It is also significantly more complex than the previous one, and while he says it there is absolutely no feedback at all, no sign that he's doing anything other than saying random things while sitting down cross-legged.

And then he's done, and he tries to send the girl a telepathic message: Hi?

Hi...? Where am I? Who are you?

You are basically in the middle of nowhere. I'm Kaede. Are you alright? I cast a spell to make pain go away, it should last half an hour, but I didn't know what was wrong -

What he's sending isn't words, really. It's—meanings, thoughts, it's the thing words stand for. It might take some focusing to notice this, though, because it feels like the pure understanding that one would usually associate with their original language.

I'm - that just happens to me sometimes - I would've been fine in ten minutes or so - well not fine but it would've stopped on its own - what do you mean you cast a spell, that's a weird way to put it...?

Weird way to put what? And—why does it happen sometimes, what was it, and how did you suddenly appear out of thin air? Also I—"think I'm going to talk while I do the telepathy thing because that might help with language."

"Yes, do that, good idea," she says, switching to the same mode of communication. "It's - you did magic, people don't cast spells outside of folk tales...? Unless I've been transported to a folk tale. Which would be interesting. Um, sometimes I just collapse in unbearable pain for no reason. My parents pissed off the wrong mage."

"—weeeee are probably not talking about the same things, here. Permanent effects on other people are impossible with any magic as far as anyone knows. And you did appear out of thin air, here."

"I have no idea how I did that, by the way, I was a little busy at the time. And what do you mean, permanent effects on other people are impossible? How's that manage to work? If you break somebody's leg with magic does it go away after ten minutes?"

"I mean permanently magical effects, like, you can't make someone else fly forever or feel sourceless pain every now and then for no good reason. Er, I'm not sure how much I should be explaining, everyone knows how magic works at least roughly so you probably come from somewhere really different."

"...Pretend I know literally nothing about magic and go from there," she suggests. "Then I'll try to do the same for you and the magic I'm used to."

"—four types of magic, or maybe three and one type of not-magic. Arcanism is what I just did, you imbue words and gestures and actions and symbols with magical effects and then spend mana to make the effect happen; elementalism is imbuing yourself with a magical effect, permanent for as long as you're using it and have enough mana; enchanting is imbuing inanimate objects with magic to give them effects for as long as they're charged up with mana; metamancy is being able to notice and see and manipulate the other types of magic, very taboo. People are born a given type of mage, very few of them, but they only find out whether and which type of mage they are if they try actively performing magic. That's the two-minute version."

"...There's - three? Six? Seven? types of magic where I'm from. The base elements are Earth, Air, and Light. Most mages are one of those. Earth focuses on the self, Air on the world, Light on other people. I'm a Light mage. Then there's Wood which is Earth and Light, Fire which is Light and Air, and Water which is Earth and Air, for people who are exactly balanced between two of the base elements. And if you're exactly balanced between all three, you're a god. Gods can manipulate other magic directly; no one else can."

"...interesting. And you've never heard of—any of these things I'm saying? How do people get magic where you're from, are they born with it? Is there, er, religion about it?"

"...I don't know what you mean by religion... Some people are born mages, but they don't find out what kind until they express their potential, which happens at some unpredictable age between about ten and twenty years old. It's really obvious after that. Earth mages can sense and manipulate earth and stone, Wood mages can do it to living things, Light mages to light, Water to water, and so on. Gods can do it to all six things plus magic itself. Or so I've heard. There haven't been gods since the last bunch all killed each other and sunk the southern continent, a few thousand years ago."