James laughs and shakes his head. "James is fine. Everyone knows me as the Commander but I don't love being called it. Feels too formal."

    "We are in the same chain of command," says the General pointedly.

"Sure, but they have no such excuse," he replies, hiking a thumb in the direction of Rytlock & co. "They're just doing it to poke me."

"Oh, but how could we call you James in public like that, it would undermine your authority," says Kasmeer sweetly.

"Excellent. James it is. Anyway, James, um, I was wondering if you had any more questions. Since I'm going to be sitting here for a while. I could make do with a book or something, but as long as there are questions it seems more efficient to answer them."

"Wait wait wait did someone say questions because I have a ton of them," says Taimi, walking back into the metal tent they reserved for Haruk's scrying, followed by two other asura who start setting some stuff up. "Or are magic questions bad somehow, that'd be a bummer but I guess finding Marshall Trahearne is 'more important' or something."

"Magic questions are fine! What kind of magic questions do you have."

"Okay! So first, I wanna know about the other places you visited that are not your world. You said there's a lot of them? We only get the realms of the human gods here, if that, jury's still out on whether they're real or some human mass hallucination event two hundred years ago."

"Yeah! We are at least pretty sure that the other planes are not a mass hallucination, and if they were it wouldn't be human-exclusive. Planes are like - some of them are continuous with the Material Plane, like the Ethereal or Shadow, and that basically means any point on either will have a corresponding point on the other? Though not always adjacent to the other corresponding points. Some of them, the Inner and Outer Planes, are just... themselves. Like the Plane of Fire, or Baator." 

"That's nothing like how it works here. How do you open portals?"

"Generally you don't. Plane Shift transports you and others equal to about twice your top circle. You can cast a Gate that lasts... minutes double circle, I think? If you're one of the most powerful people in the world, that is."

"Wait, how can you... teleport... to another plane... Do you have leylines running through planes or...?"

"Just assume literally nothing works the same, it's gonna be easier for all of us. But also: you can teleport without leylines? Cool!"

"I have no idea what a leyline is, so yes! Ours is a conjuration effect - it's... kind of hard to explain why without dipping into the higher-dimensional stuff, but the mostly fake explanation is that everything else conjuration does, and a good chunk of the other schools, is actually just a sub-effect of teleportation."

"So, if this translation thingy is working... conjuration makes things appear out of thin air, but actually you take them from somewhere else, by teleporting, which you can just... do... somehow."

"I mean, yeah, it's a fundamental magical operation. Honestly more fundamental than most of them."

"Okay but, but, but. But! How can—how do things go from one place to another without, without—going through the places between them!!!!! That makes noooooo seeeeeeeense!"

"...yeah, in three dimensions. - imagine a line. You can't get from one point on the line to another without passing through the entire intervening length, right?"

She thinks she sees where this is going. "Right."

"The line's actually a circle. The circle's actually a sphere. The sphere is actually an incomprehensible geometric abstraction. There's shortcuts."

"...I think I understand..."

"I don't!" Kasmeer pipes in brightly.

"Okay so I get that you're simplifying stuff but there's different stuff that could be simplified that way. Are you saying, one, that stuff actually does cross some sort of space, it's just orthogonal to the three usual spatial dimensions we are used to accessing but actually our or your world is just a three-dimensional cartesian projection of the higher-dimensional hyperplane; two, that the magic can actually fold space into itself within the higher-dimensional manifold so that actually no hyperspace is crossed it just so happened that you managed to temporarily make two places be the same place; or three, something else entirely?"

"It's the Cartesian hyperplane thing - stuff does kind of travel through space, but it's doing so in the form of magic, and usually it's not a meaningful amount of space because you're traveling through the Astral Plane. Which... is barely a place, only magic can exist there and it doesn't really have time."

"Doesn't... have time. As in, as in, you travel through a, a, a spacelike distance with no time component?!"

"Yep!"

Taimi shrieks and very loud typing noises start coming out of her golem as she makes a bunch of holographic screens appear around her. "That makes no sense but it makes sense why doesn't our magic work like that! How many dimensions does the Astral Plane have? Do coordinates in it have a mapping to coordinates in the Material Plane? How do you get to the other planes?"