One of the Chinese men walks in with the man from the universe with the Abrahamic heresies, both of them with their heads bowed over a sheaf of papers. 

"We don't have any assigned reading yet, do you think they went to the library, or..."

"Dunno. I could ask them, do you want me to ask them?"

"It's probably nothing but the two of them look awfully... engrossed."

"I'm curious now," she says, and gets up and crosses over to where they are failing to drag their noses out of their papers to actually get food. 

"Whatcha got there?"

"--Magic notes. Our magic systems are very different and magic is very interesting."

"I think 'magic' and 'chi' are counted separately here and mine technically falls into the latter," he says cheerfully, "which doesn't make either one not interesting." 

"I don't know much about chi yet but I'm intrigued," she says, and prompts them both to actually eat and returns to the others. She slides back into her seat just as the Chinese man is acquiring a dish with an alarming amount of red. 

"Oh good, they're okay."

"Oh, did you think maybe the papers were a hypnotic trigger?"

"Or something, yeah."

"I guess that makes sense. Something like that where I'm from would probably have looked more overtly weird."

"Huh. Why?"

"Well, because things in general where I'm from look more overtly weird. It would also have looked more overtly weird if it were some harmless non-mind-control-y magic thing, probably."

"Fair enough. If I were going to put a hypnotic pattern on something I would want it to be inconspicuous to bystanders."

"I mean the thing about where I'm from is that there are so many weird things that they aren't, in fact, particularly conspicuous to bystanders. Unless they're a flavor of weird actively known to be dangerous, like wells or the Starveling Cat or something."

"...wells?"

"Wells are where Mr. Eaten lives." Mr. Eaten being the dead god who's still mad about his boyfriend murdering him and serving his flesh up on a plate. 

"Do you have to get all your water from rivers, or...?"

"The wells mostly aren't dangerous as long as you don't linger or go down them. Someone drawing water from a well isn't concerning; people standing in a ring around it listening intently are a bad sign." 

"Your world sounds fascinating. In a terrible way." 

"Yeah, I don't really want to visit but I maybe want a shelf of your books back home."

"I'll see what I can do. A lot of this stuff isn't in books, at least not yet. I know a lot of things that are a secret from the general population, because I'm a powerful busybody with connections."

"Do you, too, have a disaster you are here to learn to address?"

"Yeah, the Judgments" (the stars) (the highest/most powerful beings) "have this whole paradigm that involves people dying and staying dead and no interspecies procreation, I've got good leverage for the small-scale problems at home, like Mr. Eaten, but to save everybody I need to do something about the Judgments."