"Well, do you know what a car is?"

He pauses. "Is that the local term for a carriage? Powered by 1-4 horses in front, then a driver, then some wealthy people behind?"

"Uh, nope. It is like a carriage but it is powered by very contained explosions and you are going to have an interesting time here. --I'm Asher son of Tiana."

Kilvin will be delighted if he can bring a sample back. They've managed to figure out a way to generate enough heat and kinetic energy to move humans over an extended period of time, just through sygaldry. Perhaps some new reaction? Or they might just have sufficient supplies of something too expensive to use at the scale that they employ: Kvothe can think of a few materials that might be able to provide the necessary force, were they as cheap as clay. Enough to enable nobles to use them, at least, particularly if it was a fad or a historical sign of wealth. "I am Kvothe, son of Arliden, of the Edema Ruh, and it is my greatest imaginable pleasure to meet you." Unfortunately, on the rather more urgent matter, it seems he may have to be a little more blunt. "Could you direct me to a money-changer, so I might acquire lodging for the night? I suspect that you don't take Cealdish coin. Have you heard of the Four Corners of Civilization, at least?"

"Not really sure you're grasping this 'new world' concept? I have no idea what the Four Corners are. --I can cover a stay at a hotel for a week or two as a favor to another performer."

His pride is pricked, but he will not offend a fellow musician if he can avoid it. "I know there are paths and routes, by which men can go much farther than they intended. I know not to wander the woods on a moonless night, and I suspect that waystones might be more truth than I had realized. But I would know what favor you want before I enter your debt." A stranger is a safer lender than a friend, but not all lenders are as friendly as Devi.

"I'm curious about the details of your world. Visitors from other worlds do not occur particularly often in the grand scheme of things, and the last one brought us cars and video games and" -- he takes out a strange rectangle from his pocket, tosses it in the air, and catches it-- "smartphones. If your world is useful, I'd like to get in on the ground floor. And I'd like to hear your music. If you would eat my food that's a bonus, I grew up in a restaurant and have not gotten used to cooking normal quantities."

Kvothe smiles. This could be the answer to everything. Power, wealth, influence. Enough to track down the legends he needs, and to understand what is truly happening with the Chandrian. "That I can certainly do, Asher son of Tiana. Lead the way, and tell me more about 'video games'".

"Nope," Asher says, "I'm going to tell you about smartphones." He presses a button on his 'smartphone' and then music starts playing, with no apparent source.

He looks at the device intently. It is emanating music. And those instruments. He doesn't see how you could get that sound: perhaps this foreign land has foreign music as well. If so, he will either be ignored or lauded, at least by the bulk of the populace: he will certainly have to learn the songs of the locals so he can provide them with something familiar, at least some of the time. The mechanism is clear enough, at least: sound is just force carried through air, and they must have found a way to bind some source of heat or motion very very very precisely to produce sound. That is probably behind their cars as well: not necessarily more powerful than anything that comes out of the Fishery, but orders of magnitude more complex. If he can take back these designs, he could be Master Artificer himself, if he was willing to do that to Kilvin. "Very impressive!" He means it, but he also emphasizes it a little more than his feelings would ordinarily justify.

Asher walks Kvothe to the hotel and provides an introduction to technology. Cars! Medical treatment! The printing press! Refrigeration! The Internet! Musical instruments!

He doesn't know what to think of their medical treatment: who knows how long they would live without it? They seem to do more complicated procedures than anyone in Medica can manage. The printing press is ingenious: something that could operate faster than the entire scriptorium. Refrigeration sounds less convenient: that might be one thing his world could trade. It is when the explanation comes to the internet that he realizes that he is confused. "Wait, how do you make sygaldry do that?"

"I have no idea what sygaldry is."

He pauses, and thinks carefully before speaking. "The use of written shapes to transform heat into kinetic energy, bind two objects together, or connect them so that motion in one causes motion in the other, even if they are far apart, among other tasks. It is the term I would use for how your refrigerators and cars work."

"That is a trait of your world but not of ours. Ours function on... scientific principles? Following the same natural laws that apply to trees and mountains and lightning? We do have magic, but only those humans descended from nonhumans can do it, and it mostly works by extremely stupid rhymes."

No sygaldry? He focuses his Alar as hard as he can, and makes a link between the fabric of two of his pockets, and pushes one. It should be a one quarter link, a tenth at worst.

It works fine. 

OK, sympathy at least functions. He feels the resistance of the second pocket, and sees it push out. "Sympathy works just fine. Not sure about sygaldry yet, but they rely on the same principles. I don't know what you mean by natural laws: a certain number of thaums sets a candle aflame whether you use sympathy or sygaldry or heat the air directly. Namers don't need kinetic force like ordinary sympathists: they might do something differently from how lightning works. Who are non-humans?" He's worried about translation: depending on his language, that may or may not include the Edema Ruh.

"World travelers usually carry their magic with them. If there's a visitor from Wonderland, for example, they can create infinite clean dishes by sitting at a set circular table and moving one down whenever they dirty a set. It's rather convenient. --There are many many kinds of nonhuman. The ones you're most likely to run into are sapient animals. Being around Auradonians makes animals as smart as humans, although they still can't talk. There are also fairies and gods and trolls and mermaids and dwarves and a bunch of other kinds."

"That sounds...convenient. I suppose this is part of how you get heroes, then. Unique magics." He pauses. "I'm not sure that what you mean by gods and faeries is the same thing that I would mean by them. What are dwarves?"  

"Fairies are powerfully magical and psychologically alien-- some of them care about being as evil as possible, some of them care about music, some of them care about politeness, some of them are just really into one specific river. Even the most human ones are... not very human. Gods are-- the grandchildren or sometimes great-grandchildren of the creator, they're very powerful and immortal and they've assigned themselves responsibility for various aspects of the world and they're... honestly rather too human, overgrown and easily offended children with lightning bolts. Dwarves are short and have a particular talent for mining."

He laughs. "I think I will try to avoid the first two. How well I succeed may be a different matter: my good intentions do not always manifest themselves as easily as I would wish. I think I begin to see why your world trains heroes by the schoolful."

(Asher is occasionally amusing himself during this conversation by walking on his hands, or backflipping over convenient poles, or jumping on and off short walls.)

"That's wise. I would also advise keeping your magic to yourself, at least for a while-- magic is illegal unless specifically permitted by King Ben, and the only use of magic he has permitted to every magic-user is contraception."

Kvothe carefully does no such thing. He has his lute on his back, after all. "I wouldn't even be willing to make a contraceptive potion, right now. I'm used to the plants from my world. At first I thought your grass was different because I'm far away from home, but it is an entirely different species, isn't it?"

"Well, I'm not sure, because all I know about your world is what you've told me, but it seems likely? Species sometimes match up across worlds but not always, and even when they match it is often in strange ways."