"As long as it's not in your pipes or your food, you're not at particular risk, anyway.  ...The Days of Wonder?"

"You don't -"

He stops mid-street and turns to look at her more squarely.

"'Course you don't know.  The days back when there were Elves and Fay and sylphs and dragons and Speaking Beasts and all sorts of wild magic everywhere, and they raised the mountains and carved valleys, and you could go out on a quest for adventure and have a story to tell if you got back - but they're not around anymore."  He shakes his head.  "Wish we had half as much magic as them.  But no."

"...What...happened to it?"

"The War."  He shakes his head, frowning.  "Don't know much; sad story.  But they say the Queen's the last Elf alive.  An' I don't know the last time anyone found some wild magic... less'n that's what got you here."

"...but where could it have possibly gone?  Is it holding the Time Lords and Daleks in stasis around fucking Gallifrey?  ...Excuse me, entirely unnecessary literary reference.  I guess the question is, 'if the magic is gone, where did it go?'  ...Which I already said.  Blah.  And I suppose you wouldn't have reason to know, anyway..."

He scratches his beard and frowns again.  "Never looked at it that way."

"Yeah.  It's...what actually changed, in the War, that the base rate of magic - ...upwelling? - did?  ...and how'd the Queen survive, for that matter?"

He shrugs.  "Never thought of magic that way.  An' don't know 'bout the Queen... don't remember, at least.  Sister would know, or that new Research Mage girl she's been talking about."  He shakes his head and starts walking toward the station again.

"Yeah.  Just needed to say that out loud so I'd remember to ask someone later."  And she's walking, and walking...

She's not walking far at all, actually.

The spellwagon station looks rustic, with a big room and open log walls on the inside, sort of like a ski cabin - more rustic than anything else in town.  Through the open windows at back (it looks like real glass, though sort of milky?  But the windowpanes are open) Mira can see a platform that looks a lot like a railroad station, with a few people already waiting there.

Randall nods to the stationagent behind one of the two counters (the other being unoccupied), a man a little older than him with a golden horse coat-of-arms sewn to a weatherbeaten shirt.  "One for Dumrath."

The agent looks surprised.  "What's taking you out of town, Randall?  Hope there's no bad news from Tilda?"

Randall puts down a few coins from his pocket and shakes his head.  "Ticket's for her."

The agent shoots a quizzical look at both of them.

"From another world, maybe."

"Another - what?  How?  Haven't heard about that since the Days of Wonder!"

Randall shrugs.  "No idea.  Thought Tilda should know."

"Yeah, I'm about as surprised as you are.  Especially since there just wasn't magic, back home.  So, yeah, going Tilda-wards, hopefully to find out."

"...Although I should note that I have no idea how I'm going to find her once I'm there?"

The agent looks in surprise.  "No magic at all?"

Randall shrugs.  "Go to the palace; tell them your story; they'll know."  He turns to the agent.  "Got paper?  For a letter for Tilda."

He pushes a pen and paper (looking like it'd be newspaper-quality on Earth?) across the counter, and then stamps a ticket.  "Good luck - the spellwagon's coming in three chirps."

"...I should note that we appear to have vastly different systems of timekeeping; I have no idea how long a chirp is.  Not that I'd necessarily need to, but I'd like to."

She'll hold on to that ticket like her life depends on it, then.

(And, presumably, the letter, too.)

"So, twelve tweets to a chirp, six chirps to a tide... we've been talking for maybe a tweet so far?"  He points up and behind him.  "There's a clock on the school next door; you can hear it chime on the chirp."

After a moment, he adds, "Are you trying to get home?  Or - what do you want to do here?"

"I don't know, yet.  Magic's pretty cool, and I know a lot of stuff that'd probably synergize with it pretty well.  I want to poke it, y'know?  ...I just dunno.  I'll find out, I suppose.  And there's so little I know yet of how things are here that would impact my decisionmaking."

"Stuff that'll work well with magic?  Then you're definitely going to the right place; the Queen will love that!"  He grins.  "And if you've got questions - well, sorry you ended up with a guy of few words like Randall.  Anything I can say before the spellwagon comes?  Or what's your world like?"

"My world...It's honestly a lot like how yours could be, in twenty to fifty years?  If you were going on and researching on your own, I mean.

"Despite the whole no-magic thing.

"And then there's the crazy shit.  I could just call up and talk to someone on the other side of the world from me.  There's a network of billions of devices that can all talk to eachother, manufacturing barely requires human input...we make a basic component of computation that's less than the thickness of a human hair long.

"I have in my pocket more externalized ability-to-compute than the project to launch a manned rocket to the moon - I still don't know if you have one of those, actually - needed to succeed."

His eyes go wide when she mentions talking to people on the other side of the world.  "It takes us a day to get a spellwagon across the country!  And that's if we're hurrying unsustainably, and we can't send news or mail any faster, unless you believe those stories from the Research Mages."

Randall looks up and smiles at this, but doesn't say anything.

The agent snorts at him.  "Hey, if it was real, you'd think they would've told everyone by now and trained us in how to do it!"  He shakes his head.  "Anyway - 'rockets'?  Don't know what those are, but we've got a moon.  They say the Elves used to go there in the Days of Wonder."

"My home country went to the moon by setting things on fire very hard."  She grins, subtly, before delivering her followup: "Fifty years ago."

"Huh!  Can you do that!?"

"Not on my own, not right now.  But I bet I could figure it out, with magic on the table."

He shakes his head and smiles.  "I'd love to see it."

Randall folds over the paper and hands it to Mira.  "Letter for Tilda?  Saying who you are, plus other news.  And good luck."

"Thank you, both of you."

And now's about the time that the spellwagon arrives, right?

Actually, it takes a little longer, but the station agent's willing to tell her a little about the town while she waits.  It's called Appledore; in the last generation or so, it's grown from a farm town to also cater to tourists coming - by spellwagon - for the hills and the nearby lake.

The spellwagon looks a lot like a train.  It's enclosed wagons coupled together, running along a (single) metal rail.  The conductor pokes his head out of a window to wave her (and a few other people) on, and Randall silently raises his hand in farewell.

The seats are draped with cloth, but they're clearly wooden benches with rough backs.

She waves goodbye to Randall, before taking in the train.

There aren't any seatbelts.  Figures.

The direction is a bit backwards, but she's half expecting to meet Arachne Tellwyrn on the other end of this ride, just off the tropespace she's been observing.

...At least she has a coat she can bundle up as a pillow.