The Millways door opens but to experienced patrons it might look a little unusual. There is an expanse of white nothingness behind the man who just walked in. He is wearing a well fitting shirt and pants with covered in intricate but subtle designs with a similarly adorned backpack strapped attached to his back by an unclear mechanism. He looks around in undisguised bewilderment and fascination.

"Well this is certainly new and unexpected." 

Temperance looks up. "Hi! New to Milliways? Don't worry, the place is safe and interesting."

"You're speaking English? Do you have your own translation magic or is this a weird coincidence? Also yes, I'm new to wherever this is. It's gratifying to hear it's safe I always hate losing time."

"I am speaking English. The place has its own translation magic and it is a weird coincidence. This is Milliways a bar that connects to other dimensions randomly. Funny you mention time because when you are in here with the door closed, time doesn't move on your native dimension," she peeks beyond him, "not that it looks there is much going on in there."

"That place is as confusing to me as it is to you," he says pointing behind him. "I got pulled out of a thread on my way to explore a new planet. The beacon from my last waystation suggests I was in transit for three hours before arriving here. In all our explorations so far we've never encountered another world that spoke english. I'm not quite sure what to make of that rule being broken."

"Ah, Milliways is further away than what you're expecting. It is basically it's own tiny universe that connects to different distinct universes, some of which have similarities. Earth is a common category despite the many different flavors it can manifest itself."

"Well then, the world is larger than the Institute knows, I'm going to have such a long report to write by the end of this." He looks down and frowns for a moment, then he looks back up with a smile. "This is going to be so much fun. But where are my manners, my name is zabna tsani. What's yours?"

"Temperance Greenpledge. From Earth in the year 2015. What year are you from? You mentioned planets exploration."

"It's 2101 on the old Earth calendar. A lot of people still use it, but there's about 3 others in more or less common use just counting those used by people who migrated from Earth in the 21st century. These days there are colonies in about twelve other solar systems and there's a lot of people living off of Earth around the solar system. I can't say much about what people on the distant planets in Earth's universe are up to since the communication lags are measured in years, but there's a lot of interesting stuff happening on planets in nearby universes as the threadwork connects things. Some of them have humans transplanted from Earth a really long time ago, and most of the transplanted humans have ended up with at least one unique magic system."

"Ooooh, that sounds like a cool universe. What is the threadwork? Are the magic systems shareable?"

"The threadwork is a series of paths through and occasionally between universes that allow you to travel along them at the speed of light. Actually using them requires either really advanced technology along with luck or a lot of time, or else you can shortcut those requirements with magic. The threadwork also lets you send high fidelity messages a bit like a fiber-optic cable, that usage isn't as difficult though. Magic varies a lot, there is one magic system that can copy other magic systems and it allows it's users to craft magical artifacts that grant some amount of those powers to other people but there's only a handful of people who meet whatever arcane criteria Wanderdeep requires to become a mage and for whatever reason it isn't friendly to forking so those few people are a pretty big bottleneck. I'm actually a fork of the first Mage known to the institute."

"Wow," Temperance asks fascinated, "that is amazing. Does this mean you have magic? What does yours do?"

"It means I have magical artifacts. Some of which are embedded in my body. One of them protects me against hostile magic, I'm not sure how absolute the protection is but it's better than nothing. Aside from that important one I have something that lets me learn languages really quickly, a lie detector of sorts, something that lets me sense and to a limited degree analyze magic nearby, and of course something that lets me travel the threads without technology too bulky to carry."

"Oooh, how does the threadwork works? Any chance my universe could be hooked up?"

"We really don't control the threadwork, to the best of our ability to discern it's a naturally occurring phenomena but then maybe it was created a very long time ago by whoever or whatever created Wanderdeep or magic itself."

"What is Wanderdeep?"

"Wanderdeep is a place, the source of the most flexible and precise magic we know of. I tend to associate it with the threadwork because it uses a lot of sophisticated space-warping magic to rearrange the threadwork in its vacinity into more convenient patterns. That's the closest we've ever seen to something changing the layout of the threads. But wanderdeep also has a magically complete, though strangely limited library, among other things. There's a pretty large research team still trying to understand all it's secrets."

"Okay, do you have any idea if there is a way to purposefully hook up two universes together? I might be able to leverage something from my end, but I am not sure."

"The honest truth is that we don't know. If you can show me your universe I can check if the threadwork is present there, but ultimately we cannot manipulate the threadwork on any large scale. Before I discovered Millways the threadwork was the only way we had to reach other universes so bridging unbridged universes it wasn't a concept even on our research agenda."

"Fair enough. What exactly showing entails? If I open the door it will lead to my universe instead of yours. Would that be enough?"

"Let me activate the display feature here, we can check Milliways first." zabna lifts his hands out in front of him a few feet apart and then twists at the air and a gently glowing area appears between them. Within the glowing area a vague outline of the room they're in appears in miniature thin tendrils brighter yellow of light crisscross the room. None of them pass through the door or even the wall the door is on. zabna gestures slightly and the view expands showing a tall hotel of unclear height above them a fuzzy landscape behind them, and a void in front of them. In this view the tendrils form into continuous loops overlapping the area. zabna turns his head sideways. "That makes absolutely no sense."

"Yeah, Milliways is like that apparently."

"The yellow color indicates that it's conducting magical energy along it. I'm not sure where it's getting that magic though, usually magic comes from structures built into the center of planets and stars and such that we call Wellsprings. We can check your world if you like, I'm not sure if this is evidence of Milliways being weird and thus we should expect threadwork to exist in your world or evidence of it being specific to my world and thus we shouldn't. Also, now I want to look at the Milliways magic."

"Oh, magic from other universes might work completely different from what you are used to. Worlds themselves can be vastly different too. And I wouldn't expect my world to have a Wellspring at all, the magic appear to be a feature of the universe itself."

"Huh, I guess there is a sense in which our magic is tacked onto the universe. We're reasonably sure that at some point we'll be able to do anything magic can do without using any. That's a pretty long way off though. We only discovered sublayers about a year ago and there might still be more missing pieces."