Why is it a ball. Who possesses maps in the form of a shower curtain and a ball.

"...Why circle thing?"

Ohhhhhhh right complete lack of science education. Right. 

"The world is a sphere! - round, like this." Wow she wants to show them the planetarium show that has an animation of zooming out from the earth. Iomedae, at least, would love it. 

...Maybe there's a decent version of it on Youtube. "If that's confusing, we can go find a video of the solar system? - it's not a real video, it's animated like cartoons, but there should be real videos too, there's a space station - like a little house but it's waaaaaaaaay up above the world, where there's no air, so it falls in a circle around." 

Evelyn should clearly never teach a science class to ESL students, she's pretty sure she's butchering this, but she's kind of beaming. It's so - something - to be the one who gets to tell two clearly very smart but very deprived children about SCIENCE. 

"The world is a ball? What it rest on?"

"Oh! That is how go north all the way and keep going!

...Which one giant fire bird hose land?"

"It doesn't! It's floating in space - well, sort of falling, the sun is also a way bigger ball, very very far away - so it doesn't look big - and the earth is falling toward it, but it's moving so fast and the sun is so far away that it just keeps falling in a circle forever. - and yeah, that's how it works, if you go all the way north in a straight line you'll end up at the north pole," she taps it on the globe, "and if you keep going forward you'll be going south again on the other side of the world!" 

...Okay what though. 

"I don't think that's a real place." Hose land???? "It sounds like it might be mythology - like something in a story. 

- I'm not a science teacher. I think I've got a solar system book somewhere, but - here, let's go find a Youtube video, that'll be even better." 

Iomedae thinks she knows what Alfirin is talking about, but she doesn't know the English for it either. She studies the ball more closely, looking for Taldor, but she has no idea what Taldor should look like. Maybe that is the Inner Sea. "God here?" she asks, pointing at the right place.

Evelyn pauses in her youtube-science-video-related excitement to see approximately where Iomedae is pointing. ...Leans in to actually read the text on the land area nearest where Iomedae seemed to be pointing, because it's not like she could find Israel on a map at a quick glance. (Iomedae's education is fascinating.)

"- Yeah, people think that God when he was a person lived around there. I think God is everywhere, now." 

"Yes, God everywhere now." - she lets her finger drift north of Absalom towards Taldor. "This place called?"

"Uh...Turkey, looks like." She chuckles slightly. "It's been a long time since I did this much world geography!" 

Not a mystery. Just Taldor not being very important to America because it's very far away.

She can go home. She hadn't realized she'd believed it was impossible until she is confronted with how manifestly possible it is. There are probably ships leaving America for it every week. 

"Turkey," she repeats carefully.

Alfirin knows Sarkoris is north of Taldor but not how far north. She doesn't know which one it is - not that she even knows if she wants to go home. Better to be home than to be a slave but she doesn't think she'd be allowed to go while she's still a slave.

Evelyn is distracted - Youtube space videos!!! - and it made (some kind of) sense to her that Iomedae cared about where Jerusalem was on a map, and she wasn't entirely paying attention enough to notice that Iomedae's tone and manner, when repeating 'Turkey', was not necessarily 100% in keeping with it being general curiosity. 

Space videos! They can head over to the computer - there's space for both girls to get a good view if Iomedae slides the office chair out of the cubicle-office and then backs up once she's pulled up a video. Thirty seconds on Youtube turns up a solar system explainer video which hopefully isn't completely terrible! 

- she really wants to show Iomedae the pale blue dot image, the first real, actual photograph of Earth from far away - that seems like something God, according to Iomedae, would be delighted about, and honestly that's a conception of God that Evelyn can so get behind - but probably it makes more sense once you've done some more leadup to it. 

The solar system is honestly very confusing but it's not like Iomedae knows any of this to be false, and it does make sense of some things like how there can be lots of places which cannot be reached by travelling in any direction - 

"Is Heaven one of the other worlds?"

Wow what an understandable yet deeply awkward misconception.

"I - don't think so - I think Heaven isn't a place you can get to by flying through space, and - we can't actually fly to the other planets, yet, just the Moon, but we can send little machines that can fly and take pictures of the other planets in the solar system, and we know they don't have people there."

(Evelyn is...definitely the flavor of Christian who thinks Heaven is more metaphorically a place than that. That's a complicated thing to convey and she's not sure she wants to get into it anyway, arguing with people about their interpretation of the Bible is rude.) 

"You send flying - machines - to the Moon? The moon in the stars?"

"It's not really in the stars, the stars are actually much, much further away than that." ...Not going to try to convey the concept of 'light-years' as a unit of distance right now, though she should totally see if Jeremy wants to attempt it when he visits next. "The moon is much closer than the sun, even, it's a ball of rock that's smaller than the earth and falls around the earth in circles, and it reflects sunlight sometimes, that's when it's bright in the sky. - but yes! We've sent people to the moon! There's television of it."

Now to find one very famous recording on Google, and explain quite seriously to Iomedae that this isn't animated like the solar system video, it's a real picture that was taken with a real camera, on the real moon. The image quality is pretty bad because it was a long time ago and cameras were much worse, then. 

"I saw it, at the time. I was only little - about Lily's age, a little bit older - and we had to go over to the neighbor's house who had a better television." 

(Evelyn has some emotions about this. She's very proud of America. ...She's not going to get into the whole Cold War space race part of things, but even so.)

"What does mean, 'real picture'?"

Evelyn was busy having feelings about moon landing videos it's fine, she doesn't actually need to see terrible-quality footage again. 

"Like this - one second. I'll show you on my camera." The digital camera is in the desk drawer. She takes a picture of the desk and computer in front of her - she's not going to take a picture of Alfirin, it's rude and can sometimes be very upsetting for children to have a photo taken without their permission - and turns the camera around so Alfirin can see the tiny viewscreen preview of it. "I took a picture of the room just now, with my camera." 

"Someone go with the wizard to the moon to make picture of wizard moon?"

"It seems like magic but it's not! It's just - machines, and rockets, and very smart people who made them. But, yeah, I - don't remember exactly how the video was taken - I think they must have brought a video camera on the lunar module, which is the machine - like a car, but for going through space - that they used to land on the moon and then take off again to go home." 

"Lunar module." That seems like an important 'machine' to remember.

"Can send army Hell same way?"

"Why send army Hell? Army evil?"