"I'd offer you a computer to give everyone subtitles but we don't have your language loaded up into the corpus yet."

"How come they're not comprehensible anyway, like you?"

"Well, I have the translation magic and not everyone gets it if they don't plan to travel. I sound like I'm speaking the native or expected language of everyone who can hear me unless I turn it off and I understand you the same way, as though you spoke fluent Anitami."

"Why don't people all get it?"

"They haven't felt the need to go to an installer since it'd be mildly inconvenient and everyone they talk to knows their language already, or they think it'd mistranslate things - it does sometimes make errors we have to correct for though usually they don't substantially impede communication - or they like learning languages the long way, or they don't like magic, or probably reasons that haven't occurred to me."

Nod. "That makes sense, thank you. So what other places are there?"

"With humans who have souls? Well, there's the one with the soul animals I mentioned. You can't touch them - they won't make that difficult but you really really can't touch them, it hurts them, understood?"

"I don't expect animals that you refer to as souls to make people a better comparison than being made entirely out of things that have mass, which it also sounds like these people are, since the animals are evidently tangible."

"...okay, would you rather see some reductionist humans next, or a more cosmopolitan city, or Materians?"

"Let's see if the reductionist ones are even distinguishable."

"Natsuko's reductionist," Nelen mentions.

Hop!

"This is a nonmagical city on the same planet." It's Kinshasa, which has been taking pretty well to the multiverse but retains plenty of local color and a nice obvious timeline in the architecture between things that were put up by demon last week and things that are somebody's fishing hut they haven't wanted replaced yet.

"All diplomats are robots in disguise. - That's a joke and not literally true."

"I'm reductionist too, just not a human. Do you want to see magic robots after this? There's a planet where people can make them."

" - I don't think I know what you mean by 'magic robots' but I guess I'll learn if I see them."

"Some of them just look like robots but others look like animate sculptures, they're pretty neat."

Pop pop pop pop pop pop.

"This is Pineappolis - it has a real name but it's really long and it's the capital of the Pineapple Islands so people just call it Pineappolis."

There are indeed a lot of robots doing stuff here with no obvious electronics or means of propulsion or exhaust and some of them look like they were made of solid stone or wood or ceramic or glass or something before they up and moved like a cartoon.

...Okay, so if these people can't personally observe the engine they call it magic, good to know.

"I like these. Do they sell them or are they too magic for that?"

"Oh, they sell them but they're nontrivially expensive since demons can't just make them and have them run, a local person has to tap them to activate them. There's a factory that way if you want to see."

"Sounds interesting."

They can hop on the tour path for the factory! Some of the local robots are unloading chassis that look like themselves off a shipping container, which is once empty teleported out and replaced with a full one. The inert chassis go on a conveyor belt that splits them into several lanes, each of which has a person relaxedly kicking back with a hand in poking range of the progression of chassis: poke poke poke poke. Each one when poked straightens up and leaps off the conveyor belt to line up to be teleported out; when one is missed on the belt for whatever reason, a person who is also doing some kind of work on a computer catches it as it goes by their end of the production line.

Why should physical touch matter? It's not a question of imparting momentum. It doesn't look like there's a material being transferred although of course human hands are always producing and always shedding material. It seems more like causing them to have minds, or something akin to minds, but at home psychic phenomena don't involve physically touching things that aren't brains. It's more reminiscent of magnetism - but being reminiscent of it at a glance isn't really the important thing -

Really the important thing is to be sure if they're using words strangely or actually don't have any scientists on any of these planets. What would they have asked if they did have scientists? This is hard to guess when he is not, himself, a scientist.

"Does it always either work perfectly or leave them inert?"

"I think this part does. The design step can fail in more interesting ways."

"Interesting how?"

"I've never seen a buggy one, they don't ship those, but I'd imagine some of the same problems you can get with a computer program if you know anything about those."

Nod. "Does anything happen if they try poking something that isn't designed, like a tree or a grain of sand?"

"Those don't turn into golems or automata, like these, but they can remotely 'puppet' things with conventional moving parts, and also bits of light and shadow..." He looks around and spots a scheduling chart on the wall where all the people have colorful lights shaped like their names that look like they're being shone on the board, except from nowhere. "Like those. And they can make animals follow natural language commands."