"That's. ... Huh." He tilts his head thoughtfully at the wheel as Boddyknock goes around it naming points. Quite a few of those sound familiar - he's heard of there being an Asgard, and Mount Celestia could be Olympus by another name... or maybe the Olympian Glades are that... and he already mentioned Limbo himself, and he's heard people claim that Hades and Hell are importantly distinct... "I think usually, when scientists very excitedly tell everyone that they've figured out a grand model of cosmology that perfectly explains everything, it eventually turns out that something more complicated is going on, but that is a very elegant grand model, thanks for the lecture. You come up with that, or it's popular in Lantan, or if I asked Eltoora Sharptyl whether it was true she'd look at me like I just asked her if the planet was flat?" 

"She'd look at you like you were cruelly demanding she talk about elementary laws of reality instead of spell development or the Netherese sewer system, assuming we are referring to the same Eltoora. But if you cornered her, she would agree with the model. And lambast me for neglecting to mention the Astral Plane, which backs the entire system. ...speaking of the Astral, she could probably take you to at least a few of the listed planes, she's powerful enough, though I'm not sure how that would interact with the quarantine. Perhaps better to stick with scrying."

"I have no idea if quarantines meaningfully apply to parallel planes with none of the same species in them. Really I should think the more relevant question is is she powerful enough to go to very distant places in the Material Plane, right, and somehow you hear all the time of hedge wizards managing to accidentally-or-on-purpose open portals to Hell and I've never met one that'd been to Mars. ... that is, the next nearest planet in the solar system my home planet lives in, and nowhere near this one as far as I know. Which incidentally is why I am coming into this conversation very confused about your entire everything." 

"She can make it across the planet, with the same expenditure of resources she would use to reach another plane; clerics find the latter much simpler, but as a rule cannot teleport. Interplanetary teleportation is stymied by the fact that instantaneous travel between multiple gravity wells introduces exponential complexity to one's coordinate system — which, if it can be compensated for at all, has not been done so in my earshot."

Oh, this would be a great time to know how to build a modern computer. These people would probably kill for Mathematica. He is not going to say the word computer to Boddynock, though, that seems like how to not end up going to bed at a remotely reasonable time. 

"There's some species that have faster-than-light signalling and transit at home but mine is not among them so I don't know how they do it. I kind of suspect they might just be tanking 'this would simply kill a human person'. Er, or a nonhuman person, as the case may be." 

Blink.

"Faster than... hm. When is Eltoora's appointment to interrogate you about your world's knowledge?"

"Eleven days in the future from early afternoon today unless I find time for it sooner. ... abruptly realizing I have no idea what day of the week it is now or how your calendar works." 

"...it's the fifteenth of Uktar. I don't know what a week is, but a tenday and one from today will be the twenty-sixth."

Boddynock conjures an illusion of a calendar-wheel.

"If she has an appointment already, then I do not need to make one myself; I will simply arrange to be present at hers. Which means I do not need to interrogate you on the fact that light has a speed."

"Ah. Yeah. Three times ten to the eighth meters per second per second, inexactly, enforced by the Speedforce Wall. If you have instantaneous teleportation you might be outside its zone of control or something, I'm also not sure how far from home I am." He examines the calendar wheel thoughtfully, and adds, "... our winter solstice was about a month ago, which probably puts a floor on it if not much of a ceiling. What's the Feast of the Moon?" 

"It's one of the intercalary feast days. Remembrance of the dead. People gather to tell stories of those they've lost, recent and ancient, and eat silvercakes."

He takes a pensive sip of his water.

"This year's will be... busy."

"Oh, I love those." Hob spins his armillary ring idly with his thumb. "Hurts but in a good way, usually. Times like this, not so much, though, yeah. That'll be--" squint-- "how many days do your months have?" 

"Thirty."

Ah. Fifteen days is probably not enough time to fix an entire magic plague although it might be enough to find the snake lady and publically have gotten started fixing it, which would at least 80/20 the making it less breathtakingly tragic to have a day of the dead festival in a biblically doomed city. Like that would just be some Greek tragedy level unnecessary. 

Wait. 

Blink, count- "Your year is the same as ours. You even have-- shieldmeet, we call them leap days. That's... that should be really unlikely, shouldn't it." 

"...yes, that's bewildering. Do you also lose Shieldmeet at the century turns?"

"Yes, we started doing that about five hundred years ago when someone noticed the calendar was drifting out of step with the solstices."

(This was highly relevant to his life at the time and his resulting fervently sincere opposition to the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in the early 1580s was probably loadbearing to convincing everyone else at court that he was definitely for sure not secretly Catholic.) 

Boddynock shakes his head. "Someone is clearly playing silly buggers... to use the academic parlance."

"A-yep. I hear there's a bunch of alternate Earths - that's my planet, Earth, yes I am aware the name is hilariously uncreative, we used to think there weren't any others you see - but I think they usually also have the same continents and this one doesn't." 

"Continents have been known to change..." Star globe illusion, turning through the seasons. "Do you know your constellations?"

They are in no way similar. This is pretty much immediately obvious, because Toril's constellations are, in many cases, ridiculously neat. There's a perfect circle of bright blue stars, labeled Mystra's Crown, that stay in one place the whole year at the celestial north pole. There's also an enormous prismatic nebula, visible to the naked eye for about a quarter of the year.

"It's been a minute since I was a sailor but wow no those are not the same as ours. Why are they like that?" 

"I dearly hope that you understand how little I can answer that question."

Sympathetic snort. "Right, too vague. I meant those," he points. "Stars don't... stay put from the perspective of the planet's surface like that, generally, not in groups. Are they- geosynchronously orbiting magically luminous moons or something?" 

"...they are stars," Boddynock says, taking another drink. (Of water.) "They are set into the crystal sphere. As stars are. ...we do have magically luminous moons, but they are moons."

"... so I'm about fifty/fifty that your entire physics is just wildly different versus that your astronomers are a couple centuries behind ours but I'm so curious now. When you say crystal sphere, singular, do you mean one or do you mean like-" 

He pulls pen and paper from his jacket pocket and scribbles a diagram on top of the newly useless bullet points about consulting the literature department to make sure their new library acquisitions request lists don't overlap. 

"-like this?" 

Boddynock is boggled by multiple things here, but the pen, while inexplicable, seems like something can analyze later.

"Neither is quite correct. The sun of Abeir-Toril is orbited by eight planets, all floating in total void. Beyond the eighth planet, at a distance of approximately five million miles from the center of the sun, is a perfect sphere of impossible crystal. Beyond that crystal is an infinite or effectively infinite ocean of raw, Chaotic phlogiston. In the phlogiston, it is said, swim other worlds, within their own spheres. ...I have also heard of boats traversing the phlogiston, but I have never met such a sailor and so I will not state it as fact."

Fascinated blinking. 

"...five... million.... that's closer than Saturn. That's the sixth planet in our system, you can see it with the unaided eye in the night sky in the autumn. This crystal sphere of yours has been observed? If so I think that's the 'different physics' one. ... A sea of phlogiston sounds very dangerous, I understand it's known to cause psychosis followed by death even in small quantities when isolated from the air. Though I suppose technically that's also true of regular seawater so maybe that indeed does not stop people from sailing it."