He shrugs. "Happy to not bring up your personal stuff if you don't want me to. Though I don't much like lying and probably won't do it. I'm probably not going to use much magic besides what I've already got, though, the translation and the immortality and—" he makes a brief, abortive gesture, "—aw, fuck, not my sword. Figures. Mostly just the translation and immortality, then. Thing is, when you use magic, it gets out of your control sometimes and does stuff you didn't mean to. The more magic, the bigger the problem and the harder it is to keep hold of it in the first place. I tried to do something bigger than I should have and fucked over a whole continent and got upset about it and wandered around until a problem got me and that's how I ended up a pile of bones. So I'm not too keen to try casting anything else at the moment."

That implies rather a lot of power for this magic, then, doesn't it.

"A problem?"

"We call them 'cursed cities', where someone's let a whole piece of land—usually a city, there just aren't enough idiots anywhere else—get soaked in spellfray until it's magic through and through and not in a good way. They generally kill anyone who steps into one, though sometimes they just fuck them up instead. I'm sure if I wasn't immortal I'd have died of whatever sent me here."

"Cursed cities made of evil magic that send immortal men places. Okay. That's happening now. Sure."

"I don't know that I'd say it's evil magic, just sort of... cursed. But I guess I see what you mean."

"That's the stuff of stories. ...I'm a little bit the stuff of stories but your thing is the kind of stuff of stories about entirely different worlds, fantasy settings that aren't even trying to be realistic and are just trying to be fantastical, that's how out of context you are. —by which I mean the way you should expect to be treated by everyone is 'you are literally lying' if you tell them about that, even your immortality isn't as outlandish as all of that. I know you're not lying because psychic," and pretty damn good at reading people besides, "but I think most people wouldn't really believe you."

...but also, out of context magic might... well. He guesses it depends on what that magic can do, doesn't it?

"Well. All the more reason not to bring up magic until I'm comfortable doing some, I guess. Which may be a while."

"So, we have a fair amount of walking to do and thus time to kill, wanna trade stories about our respective worlds?"

"Sure. You first, all my stories are upsetting."

"Surely not all of them, but alright. Is wherever you're from the kind of place that has planets? I wanna know how far I should be backing up."

"Let's say I'm not totally sure what you mean about 'having planets'."

"That kind of fantasy setting, then.

"So, we're standing on a sphere of rock. It's so large that it looks flat as far as your eyes can see. That's a planet. And in this universe one of the laws of physics says that everything attracts everything else proportionally to how heavy it is; as far as this force is concerned, you and I are very light, so we attract each other almost not at all, and this enormous planet attracts us only enough that we can walk on it, but we can still jump anyway, even if we fall again afterwards, so it's a very weak force, relatively speaking. That's gravity.

"The sun," and he points up at it, "for that matter, is a sphere of not exactly but kind of fire, and it's millions of times heavier than this planet, millions of miles away. The planet is kind of always falling towards it but since it's going really fast it keeps overshooting by just enough that it goes in a circle around it instead; the time it takes to complete a full circle is a year. Also the planet is rotating around itself, and one full round is a day."

"...all right, I'm with you so far. I don't know if that's exactly what people expect the sun to be where I'm from, I didn't pay much attention to that sort of thing. I do think we knew the world was a ball and down went toward the middle and day happens to the side of the ball that's got the sun shining on it, I think that stuff matters for navigation because of... reasons I understood once for a couple of hours when I was fourteen. Now what's this about planet-s?"

"The universe is really big, probably infinite, and there are then an infinity of planets in it around an infinity of—stars are the same kind of thing as the sun, don't know if you knew about that part, they're just even farther away than that. And most stars—maybe every star? not sure—have planets circling around them. Our sun in particular here has five, this one is the second closest, the farthest one is ten times as far from the sun as this one is.

"Most planets aren't inhabitable by humans or the kinds of things that live on planets with humans. Many are mostly gaseous with an icy core, many have toxic gases instead of breathable air on the surface, many are too close to or too far from their sun to be able to support the right temperatures, many suns don't even have planets around the right distance to support our kind of life."

"...'a whole world where all the air is poison so you can't breathe it' is more cursedness than I thought there could be and now I'm glad in hindsight that I didn't do that to my planet. Anyway, go on."

"...you know, when you put it like that, yeah most of the universe is just very cursed."

"Anyway! Reason I bring this up is that I wanted to tell you that this planet is not where humans are from. Humans are from another planet on another star so far away you can't see it in the night sky, you can't even see it with a telescope."

"...huh," he says. "I guess it makes sense that there's stars you can't see at all, since there's stars you can only see some of the time..."

"Stars you can only see some of the time?"

"Yeah, you know, like on brighter nights or cloudier ones, you can't see as many."

"Oh. No, not really like that, it's... man, how do I even explain it. Do you want the long explanation or the short explanation or to just accept as fact that stars very far away can't be seen and move on?"

"I think if you try for the long explanation then years from now I'll be saying 'and I understood that once for two hours when I was nineteen.' Sure, stars very far away can't be seen, go on."

"Cool. Anyway, very far away planet, yeah, because they... I guess cursed is not a bad word for it? Humans kind of cursed that planet by polluting it too much and consuming so many of its natural resources that it couldn't really sustain them anymore. So with the last of their resources and technology they launched a grand expedition that sent spaceships out looking for other planets where humanity could live. There were billions of humans then, and the vast majority of them left that planet on one or another such colonisation project."

"They cursed it so bad that poison air worlds sounded like a better bet? Or they had a way to look as far as a star that can't be seen, to find which worlds have air you can breathe?"

"Second one, yeah. But also, it turns out that we can turn planets habitable that wouldn't normally be, at least within a certain range of ways they're not by default habitable. So what they did was they sent the ships out to locations they'd scouted out in advance and then once the ships were close enough to target they started doing more targeted scouting.

"The group of ships that got to this planet was actually extremely lucky," in a way, "the air here was almost completely nontoxic and the temperatures are in very liveable ranges."