"-Phenomenally lucky to be in the right place at the right time. Unfortunately the portal will close within... Thirty minutes. You have the Long Road Home, so we can have a little expedition. See if there's anything interesting on the other side."

"...In and out, twenty minute adventure? Nothing's ever gone wrong with that."

"You're referencing something I don't care about again. Could be twenty minutes. Could be weeks or more. We can come back to Noten with your pocket dimension whenever we agree we're done, I'll be flexible. I think it's worth it for the chance at novel insights. And you frequently express a desire to explore new places too."

"...Yeah, yeah. Alright, fine." She stretches, then holds out one hand. "Invisible on the way through, just in case?"

"Lemme cast buffs. In case it dumps us out over lava or an ocean or something."

Sinnah spends a full minute, by the clock, drawing out sheets of paper and waving her hands over them in different patterns.

A rift between worlds tears open for a bare few moments, flaring with actinic purple light as a vertical slit in reality open to a dreamscape of towering cliffs and sodden rain, depositing two invisible humanoids and a quantity of water. 

The two individuals have a silent conversation and move a block over from their entry point, careful not to leave anything so obvious as muddy footprints.

The flash of purple light is caught by the surveillance automation and the subsequent vision of another world and the water is recorded carefully. It doesn't match to any expected phenomena so a request is sent for assets with more sensory modalities to be deployed. One small robot waits briefly and then skitters over to collect a sample of the water.

None of the people react to their travels. Most of the buildings are only three or four stories with taller ones going as high as ten. That is with the exception of the tall cathedral complex in the city center. The roads are oriented so it's almost always visible.

The streets are mostly host to foot traffic with the occasional small metal truck moving materials from one place to another. The buildings seem to be a mix of residential and commercial.

"...This looks... Industrial. Look at all the vehicles."

"It does. Not necessarily Tirran, there's no reason other societies can't independently derive robotics and powered vehicles. I think the City of Steel could build one."

"Magic is just so much more convenient, right, so it's mostly not worth it going into the physical sciences?"

"Quite. I have some understanding of physics and chemistry but taking the long way around to manipulating things is so boring compared to simply elegantly redacting reality in favor of your vision-"

Sinnah has a sudden thought and pauses to check which if any objects around her are magic, fingers twitching.

For the most part the city is non-magical.

But someone positively humming with magic just appeared back near their portal if she can sense that far.

"Mage."

What was that, teleportation? Such magic is perilous for wizardry, and unintuitive for witchcraft-

"Looking at the portal. Looks human... Do we have any real reason to hide?"

"There don't appear to be any immediately hostile monsters, no. But it looks like a war zone here."

"Hiding will make us look suspicious."

...She evaluates the few foot travelers, looking at their appearance and attitude.

The mage is wearing a sort of sculpted armor made from something that doesn't quite look like metal covering vital areas while the rest of her skin is covered by a tight-fitting jumpsuit and solid looking boots. The whole ensemble is colored in a variety of soft pastel colors mostly blues and greens. Her head is covered by a transparent but visibly there bubble of some glass-like material. Those who see her mirror their reaction to the machines with the mix of positive and negative emotions both accompanied by intimidation.

The vast majority of the men are wearing fairly simple tunics with colorful badges on their arms near their shoulders. If Sinnah and Weiss watching closely there seems to be a hierarchy of respect among the men based on what badges people have. A few of the men seem to eschew that in favor of either not wearing badges or switching to more varied fashions like pants and shirts but it's clearly not a well liked stance judging from the expressions on the other men's faces.

The women are a bit more varied; a solid majority of them are wearing simple robes that largely conceal their figures, and cover their heads entirely, but a sizeable majority of them are wearing other attire. Among those others some are attired to match the men, usually without badges though, most of them carry themselves with a sort of fragile defiance. The next largest group wears blouses and long skirts, they're still not showing very much skin. Still fewer are more daring and varied. All the women wearing non-traditional clothing catch at least a few nasty glances and whispered comments from the men.

"Ohkaaaay I think this might be a freaking... Saudi Arabia situation."

"What's Saudi Arabia?"

"Vague past life memories, just an impression of - women don't have rights and have to wear burqas," she gestures towards one such woman. "Think the Sandalwood colonies. You know how foggy that stuff is. But the tension in clothing styles implies a recent conquest that is now pretty much settled? And the conquerors have magic, which makes me nervous. War is... Bad. Very bad."

"I'll take your word for it. I want to learn their magic and I'm going to go talk to her."

And there's not much point trying to stop me, goes the unspoken assumption in their relationship.

"Stay invisible, or don't, but pull it off me, okay?"

...She stays invisible and follows Sinnah as she walks towards the magic person, suddenly appearing and waving lazily.

The woman turns when Sinnah appears and sends out a brief and gentle pulse of some sort of sensory magic.

She calls out a greeting in an unfamiliar language and waves back. Then she conjures an illusion showing the outline of two people walking through the portal and then herself appearing and then Sinnoh dispelling her magic while the outline of the other person remains invisible.

(Nope she is going to go be on a roof now!)

"Hey, yeah, pretty much."

She doesn't have natural felicity with kitsune illusions. That's okay because she can do a much more complicated wizardry illusion, piloting it with twitching fingers. It's all blocky shapes but it shows - two cubes with triangle 'ears', one white the color and one white the skin tone, on a background of a forest(?), then a circle appearing, then the cubes talking to each other and then going into the circle, then the cubes walking through rainy cliffs, then going through another circle and being in the city.

...White cube-with-triangle ears makes noise and squarish blocky shapes appear. This-person-colored cube makes noise and squiggly round shapes appear.

So they're probably not lucky enough to have a shared language then.

She adds the language symbols to her illusion then splits it in three. In one she's surrounded by small illusions designated as such and gradually the symbols get more similar.

The second fades in and out a little bit it shows Sinnah doing something and then the symbols being the same.

The third shows the woman stepping over and touching Sinnah and some sort of energy flowing into her and then both of them holding some sort of object before light is exchanged between the two of them and each starts speaking a mix of both symbol types.

Oh, they'll just give her novel magic? Absolutely. Yes. Option #3 please, she points at it.

Is this possibly foolish, playing with unknown energies of a recent conquerer's design? Yes. She does not care. This is a woman who would become a cleric of Nethys very quickly in some other timeline.

The woman steps forward and offers her hand. After Sinnah takes it the woman channels energy into her body. If Sinnah is very attuned to these sorts of things, she might notice that not all the magic is coming from the woman, some of it is channeled through the woman. She might also notice that the other magic around the woman weakens a bit as much of it is channeled to her. The experience of having the energy channeled into her wants all her attention though so she probably won't.

The magic spreads out though her body and her soul; from the depths of her stomach to the tip of her tail and the ears at the top of her head. As it spreads, it carries a warm soothing feeling washing away any little bits of stiffness in her muscles and doing a little for any deeper injuries she might have suffered. It tries to carry her attention with it; spreading her awareness through her whole body in a way that would stretch most people's attentional capacity but somehow doesn't. And then somewhat after it encompasses her whole self a critical point is reached and something deep within her soul shifts. It feels a little like an ignition or perhaps the blooming of a newly planted flower. And suddenly all the magic that's been flooding her stops being other and becomes hers.

The woman's magic reaches out to steady her just in case.

The thing about kitsune bodies is that they are only maybe 75-85% really really real, a detailed and convincing facsimile of actual matter and biology built upon a bedrock of dream magic wrapped around soul.

The moment to moment physical experience of being a kitsune is remarkably smooth and pleasant; Tiny injuries and aches and pains aren't really a thing that happens to them, mostly, unless they're the pleasant-reminder-of-exertion-or-bondage kind. There's very little to mend on that front save slight muscle strain in the hands and legs, and a chipped nail, and some light tobacco withdrawal.

She's obviously watching the energy with her eyes the whole time, via Arcane Sight. When this process completes, she immediately attempts to manipulate it in the same instinctual ways she manipulates Will to cast wizardry spells- Pulsing in controlled beats at different parts of the body, different intensities, in carefully timed on-off bursts.

Once it's clear she's not going to fall over the woman releases her hand and steps back pulling the supportive magic with her since it wasn't needed.

The new magic responds to her will but she doesn't seem to have hit on the right pattern or mechanism to make it do anything in particular. In its base state and in the absence of any apparent injury or deficiency it will simply reinforce the areas she focuses it, increasing her durability by a small amount in a fairly unstructured way.

It can extend outside the body. Let's see if she can create fine structure and sculpture with it. Can she disconnect a portion from herself entirely? Can she make it fractal? Can she sculpt a spectral fox out of it? (Sinnah is only passively aware that this woman is still here).

Disconnecting it entirely causes it to destabilize and return to her. The limit on how complex a pattern she can make is her attention which seems to stretch at least a little further than it did before. If she can fully visualize the fractal or fox pattern she wants to make she came do it but the raw form of the magic doesn't do anything in particular upon exposure to the air.

She might manage something simple like creating a bit of light, or heat or force if she's trying a lot of different possibilities. The trick to make it do things is changing something like the texture of the magic. Certain patterns of raw magic can also serve as filters to change the texture but she's unlikely to stumble on them by chance.

Well, not in the first five minutes, no.

Acknowledging nod to her benefactor after a little while.

The woman nods back then conjures four small illusions one above the other three. The first is just a replication of the two of them with different symbol sets. The three below all show them holding some sort of presumably enchanted object but they differ in what happens next. One shows Sinnah passing her symbols to her benefactor. The second shows the reverse and the third shows an exchange.

Oh, she wants to learn all of the things. Option #2 please.

A small item appears in the woman's hand and she holds it out to her, some sort of magic flows out of the woman and nestles inside the artifact as she does. Under mage sight the item looks a bit like an empty framework. The scaffolding for power without any appreciable power to speak of, save for the small almost fragile magical construct the woman just moved into a slot within it.

If she reaches out to touch it, it feels a bit like a vacuum to her new magic, she could easily resist the pull, her new magic is hers to control, but she is curious isn't she?