Merrin nods along. 

"That's - less magic involved in things than I'd been expecting?" 

:I haven't been able to implant Gifts in people for very long, and then they need training. Eventually we hope to have a Gate network, but there's a lot of other infrastructure we want to work on in the meantime:

"Do most people not have Gifts at all, then?" 

:Yeah, most don't. And some are rarer than others. Valdemar in particular, my country, doesn't have very many mages - Rethwellan, where I was educated, has a lot more, and they don't have a gate network either. Mages are the most flexible - Mindspeech is convenient and Healers are very important and I'm personally fond of Fetching but if you want infrastructure you need mages, making and powering artifacts:

Merrin nods, slowly. "So...it sounds like there are a lot of problems, and the fastest solution to some of those problems is via something that you can do, except - you're not there. Did you say your husband can also do it, though?" 

:Yes, though in the short term I expect him to be working on tracking me down!:

"Right. I'm guessing someone is going to be trying to track me down too, but I don't even know where they would start, unless the snake thing turns out to be easy to capture and study. Which I somehow doubt. It seems more likely to eat scientists, although in that case I might've expected some other new arrivals."

She's almost HOPING that the snake will eat a scientist. She could really use backup here from someone better equipped to study and make sense of a bizarre and unprecedented situation like this one. She does not actually hope this will happen because that would be kind of a terrible thing to wish on someone else and also who knows whether the process is even replicable like that. 

:Yeah, I don't know whether Leareth - my husband - is going to get here by studying the snake or by doing something like tracking me by our lifebond and my bond to Amshalan, my magic horse. But I'm sure he's on it one way or the other. Once he's got it figured out if your people haven't located you we can try to get you to your home?:

"That would be really amazing, if it comes to that! Is your husband very good at magic?" 

:Best in the world:

"Wow! That's– hmm, actually I guess I don't know if that's a weird and surprising coincidence, maybe there's some kind of selection criteria on who gets eaten by snakes and pooped out into another world. Although that doesn't explain me. I'm very boringly ordinary." 

:I'm not boringly ordinary at all but I wasn't doing anything much at the time. Also the local god ought to have had the courtesy to warn me:

“The local— wait, what? Back up and start at the beginning? You have - I’m not even totally parsing what that concept is -“

:Do you not have them? They're often more trouble than they're worth, but we do have them. Gods are weird magic people who see the future kinda instead of the present and they're good at engineering coincidences and don't have bodies? The future thing makes them very weird but Leareth did some work with ours to make Them easier to talk to:

"No! We don't have those! .....I think. I'm fairly sure we don't have those. I'm guessing that engineered coincidences - stand out as noticeably different from what you would expect from just normal causality and randomness?" 

Merrin is thinking that conceivably this is the kind of thing that the Keepers might have learned about and decided to classify as an infohazard. It feels very infohazard-shaped. She....still doesn't think so, though. The world she experienced wasn't one that had unexplained sources of confusion and outcomes that were off from her predictions - or from much smarter people's predictions. 

"- What did Leareth do, to - make gods easier to talk to? I'm struggling to think how it would even be possible to interact with them if they don't have bodies and can't talk in normal ways." 

:A lot of the time it's not very conspicuous until they start giving people visions or doing miracles or trying to assassinate my husband, which they do sometimes - many of them like having mortal churches for some reason - so I suppose yours could all be hiding. Uh, there was an artifact created by a god called the Star-Eyed and he did very complicated magic to co-opt it from her and turn it over to the local god, who we're calling Shadowgod for lack of a better idea, with some extra magical scaffolding of some kind that helps bridge the gap so it can just Mindspeak us instead of doing visions and talking to people through a weird puppet when they have near-death experiences and stuff:

".....Okay, um, back up a step, you're saying the the weird powerful magical disembodied people with future-seeing-magic have tried to murder your husband specifically? Why? Or is that just a normal thing that happens sometimes?" 

:Oh, they don't like him specifically because he has grand ambitions that make it harder to see the future. They like everything to be very samey and low-tech and predictable so they can see farther and he fogs things up for them. Shadowgod is chill though:

Merrin has so little idea what to say to any of that! Are condolences appropriate? 'I'm sorry the superpowerful magical aliens keep trying to kill your loved one'? 

"What sorts of grand ambitions does he have?" she settles on, finally. 

:Oh, ending death, ushering in a new age of prosperity, developing our collective resources sufficiently to weather the forthcoming catastrophic magical weather...:

"Awwwwwww. That's so romantic. You are literally married to the perfect archetype of the very powerful supervillain gendertrope." 

("Supervillain" comes across to Thoughtsensing as containing zero connotations of evil or condemnableness, but definitely some connotations of 'likes dramatic dark volcano lairs and giving eloquent monologuing'.)

...It's kind of a suspicious level of romantic, actually? Merrin is not sure she has ever encountered this level of romance gendertrope outside of romance novels. Is Belrun literally from a romance novel.

She suddenly has a pileup of additional questions, from "do you have any other boyfriends who are equally interesting" and "was he possibly sort of struggling before you met him", to "is it fair to say that if your world was a book he would be the protagonist". 

Belrun is getting the hang of not getting thoughts that are not components of what's being communicated to her but she does get the connotations to a fair depth. :- he does have an underground lair but it's not near a volcano. Why would it be near a volcano. I don't think he does a lot of dramatic monologues either:

"Because volcanos are an extremely cool dramatic aesthetic that goes well with the supervillain aesthetic? ...I'm not really sure why that association is so strong actually." Okay no she has to ask. "Do you also have other boyfriends who are that interesting and excellent?" 

:No? Is that normal where you're from, having surplus boyfriends?:

"I mean, I wouldn't say it's very common in real life but it's - a storytrope that would go with the sort of romance novel where the male protagonist is a powerful supervillain who's the best in the world at magic and has grand ambitions to end death. ....Is he immortal? In the romance novel version he would probably be immortal, and have offered it to you, like, a day after you met. And have some convincing reason for falling instantly in love even though he's never truly loved anyone before. ...Sorry, your world is probably not actually best modeled as a particular genre of fiction."