He follows. "I'm Raafi. Or you can call me Traveler, if you'd rather, that's a title for my kind of magic-user. Not that we usually end up traveling this far."

"Did you get here by magic?"

"I'm guessing so. That kind of thing does happen from time to time in my world. Not often without someone doing it on purpose, and that doesn't seem likely, but it does sometimes happen naturally, too." Hike hike. "Tomorrow I'll try to send a message to my friends back home, maybe they can send someone to figure out what happened."

"If it happens naturally why haven't I ever heard of hummun before?" Bav says, neglecting the plural.

"This isn't one of the places that kind of magic usually sends people, is my guess. We don't have the main ones mapped, exactly, but we know enough about them that I don't think this is one - mostly they're very dangerous, so I'm not really complaining. I couldn't guess why I got sent somewhere new, though, they'll have to send a scholar to try to figure that out."

"Huh. Who are your friends? Will they be able to get you home? I don't know what we'd feed a hummun."

"There's a few people I might ask - some other magic-users the same kind as me, or I have a friend who's a prince who might be willing to hire someone to try. They'll be able to get me home if they can get here - I'd be able to get myself home if I'd been expecting to wake up in a different world - but if they can't, I might be stuck for a few years until I'm powerful enough to get back on my own. I can feed myself, though, don't worry about that."

"What, do you have magic fruitcysts that grow even if that's all you eat? I read a book like that once," said Bav. "What good would expecting it have done you?"

"There's a special tool I'd need to have to aim an interworld transportation spell; they're a little rare, but I could have gotten one. And - not quite that, humanoids don't grow fruitcysts at all, but there's a spell to make food, and another one that lets me see what's safe to eat if I want to try local things. Which I probably will eventually, magic food gets boring after a while, but I won't get sick or anything if it turns out I can't eat any of it."

"Huh. That's quite a variety of spells. I guess I don't know what I would've expected if I'd been told I was going to meet a magic alien."

"I have a pretty unusual amount of magic even for my world," he nods. "Do you have magic here at all? It kind of sounds like you don't."

"We don't! The word for it would be because of books and plays and such about imaginary things."

"Huh. Well, you'll probably be able to pick it up, once we can bring people back and forth and get you some teachers. Or my kind of magic you can pick up even without that, at home, if you have the right aptitude."

"Aptitude?"

"Mmhmm. You get my kind of magic from being very devoted to a concept, if it's the right kind of concept - travel will do it, or community, or nature, or healing, and have to be fairly perceptive on top of that, and the more perceptive you are the stronger of a spellcaster you'll be. But if you have that and know what you're doing, you can pick it up on your own - it still takes a while, but it's not complicated, I can explain it in well under an hour."

"I don't know that I'm particularly devoted to a concept. I don't know what that would even mean."

"Most people aren't, and usually it either comes naturally to you or it doesn't. I was miserable living in one place when I was a kid, I always knew I was meant to be out seeing the world. And that's unusual for a human, most of us live pretty settled lives."

"Huh. I'm pretty happy with my life. I had a malcontent phase when I was first looking to settle down but I won a literature contest, met Soramu."

"Mmhmm. Well, you get most of the benefit just from having a few spellcasters around, anyway, most of our magic solves problems you wouldn't have every day. At home, at least, I suppose I don't know enough about things here to say, yet."

"Problems like, what, not liking trains? Not having... grocery money? But presumably people'd also have to get paid to magically make the groceries."

"Not having grocery money is the kind of problem some of us solve. Not directly with magic, though - we care about things, right, for me it's travel but for some of the others it's something where they'd want to help with that - they care about making sure everyone in their community is okay, or about people getting to have things they enjoy, or about people not getting sick from malnutrition, or something. And having magic to support ourselves on means we have the time and resources to spend on doing something about those problems, even if the magic itself doesn't help much. The magic is more for things like injuries, or safely fighting monsters, or communicating over very long distances, things that a whole community might need every day but any individual probably doesn't need all that often. Or for emergencies - I have a big weather spell, for example, and most years I never cast it, but when a drought comes around it's a life-saver."

"Monsters?"

"-I guess you might not have them, without magic, most monsters are at least a little magical. My world has all kinds of dangerous creatures out in the wilderness, and sometimes closer to civilization, too, you'll get them going after livestock or things - not just animals, lots of them are smarter than that, or can do their own magic, breathing fire or making illusions or things."

"I think here it's just people and some not very dangerous animals. A spren could kill me or a kid but not an adult female, and only if we weren't careful, we make sure they're dead before we get close when we're hunting."

"That sounds about right for regular hunting on my world, too. Not that we have people the size of your females around, in most cases - there's giants, but they live separately, and most other kinds of humanoids are my size or smaller. By species, not by gender, our females are usually a little smaller but a tall female will still be bigger than an average male of her species."