"So, I can tell you some of my story, but I'm afraid you will find it unbelievable and then lose interest in me. I wonder if you would be willing to hear the story but hold your judgment of me in abeyance for a time after you've heard it. Obviously you may eventually lose interest in me anyway, but I'm asking you to base your judgment on interactions other than my story."

"That is not something I can promise you.  I judge what I judge.  I will cheerfully undo my judgment if what I see with eyes open implies that my first judgment is wrong."

"But that would require you to keep me in your field of vision, such that your open eyes might still continue to collect data."

"That doesn't require you to convince me of your grand thesis.  It only requires that you present me with at least one anomaly I don't understand yet."

"I am better than anyone you have ever met at noticing when I don't yet understand an anomaly."

"A bold claim! You have no idea who I've ever met! To say that without any caveat or reservation is equivalent to saying you're better than literally everyone everywhere ever. Is that what you mean to say? Or are you exaggerating yet again?"

"Oh, I suppose in some sense it's a guess, but it's a very reliable guess, unless somewhere among a thousand planets there's an entire population of people who are much better at it than the averages I know.  It is rumored sometimes that the Dread Emperor goes about in disguise, but any random person you meet is not likely to be him."

"I will make a note to sand off some of the edges of everything you say from now on!"

"Anyway."

"Yesterday was my first day occupying this body. Previously, this body was inhabited by an entirely different person, and I inhabited an entirely different body in a different universe. I guess we'll just start there."

"Improbable on the surface of things, but if the Dread Emperor created our bubble of reality as people sometimes claim, he must have come from somewhere before then.  Based on your observation of our world so far, what's a worked and developed idea from your universe that you would expect to have not been worked and developed here?"

"I don't know for sure because I've seen very little of this world so far and do not know how physics hangs together here, or what the limits of magic are. But in my world we have something called electromagnetic force and we use it to power a vast array of devices for many different tasks. I would like to assemble a few materials here and start experimenting to see if it works the same here, and find out if it is also well known or if it was just easier to reach for magic."

"I know of electromagnetism as I know of fire.  But if this is a masquerade by you, well-done on selecting what would plausibly be a grand accomplishment of another world, that truly had no idea at all what was already known here."

"It doesn't seem likely that you'd know personally how to create any grand constructs of electromagnetism; what your putative civilization could do there exceeding any facet of our world, if indeed it had invested more skill there, would probably be a complex of arts not contained within any one individual.  Though I'm open to hearing differently."

"Otherwise, any other ideas?"

"Do you know, in this world, how to send a secret message in such a way that only the intended recipient can decode it, and it would be prohibitively expensive for anyone who intercepts the message to break the encoding?"

"Transform letters into numbers using their positions in the alphabetical ordering.  Create a very long list of numbers to add or subtract from those positions, treated circularly.  Give the list of numbers to the message recipient in advance.  So long as you never reuse numbers from the list, the message cannot be decoded by anyone who does not have that list."

"I believe I can improve upon that state of the art significantly. But, moving on."

"Do you know the mechanism by which the traits of the parents are passed to their child?"

"The information is carried in both male sperm and by the woman's body."

"Why move on?  The one-time number list is the simplest and best way of exchanging coded messages.  I don't see how you could improve upon it, actually."

"Well, for a start, you have to exchange number lists in advance. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to send messages between any pair of people without any per-pair preparation?"

"I'm moving on because I've now learned that I have valuable information and I don't want to reveal it for free."

"Do you ever have food or supply shortages, in this world, and do you know what causes them and how to prevent them?"

"I'm not sure I understand that question.  Food is always short; if it weren't, more children would survive to adulthood and have more of their own children until food was short again.  If there was ever an age where that wasn't true, it would've been while Eldrida didn't already have as many planets as it could sustain and the Dread Emperor or someone was still making planets or dragging them into place."

"I don't see how in principle you could have a code that worked without preparing something in advance.  Can you explain a key insight that would make that possible, without revealing your actual method?"

"So food is always the limiting factor, here, on how many children are born? It's never anything else? Do people have reliable access to methods of preventing conception of children?"

Making planets! Dragging them into place! Well that's interesting. Opalyn makes a mental note to come back to that.

"As for the code, I'm a little wary of giving you the key insight as that might actually meaningfully lower the value of my own information. It would help me to know how you actually do arithmetic over large numbers. Or even -- what you would consider to be a large number."

"Large numbers, I'd say, are those which require understanding interesting mathematical facts in order to express, most classically the well-ordering structure of an ordinal such that you can apply the fast-growing hierarchy to that ordinal.  The first barest steps into that field of mathematics will yield numbers too large to be written down on all of the paper in all of the planets, and consequently large numbers are too large to perform arithmetic upon them.  Some relatively simple large numbers can be expressed in a compact notation and communicated in that form, but adding one to that large number will yield a result which can only be compactly expressed by leaving that addition unreduced and unsimplified."

"Taking the basic premise at face value and given that the previous topic was encoding secret messages, I would conjecture that your putative civilization is less mathematically advanced than ours and by 'large number' you meant one that requires a whole sheet of paper to write down.  I would expect that building a bigger version of the arithmetic machines used by accountants would suffice to multiply or add numbers like that as well."

Oh wow, he was doing so well, until he ran aground.

"Perhaps you're right, we'll see. Can you tell me more about the arithmetic machines that accountants use? What operations do they offer, how long does it take them to execute those operations, and how do they work, internally?"

"Based on your pattern of questions, I wonder if your putative civilization has been doing interesting things with message-sized numbers."

"The arithmetic done by accountants is very simple compared to the mathematics involved in wizardry.  Multiplication, addition, subtraction, occasionally division.  It is done by placing gears and switches into a pattern that corresponds perfectly to the encoding of a number in base three.  Importantly, the operations are effectively error-free, and consistency checks can be mandated into the system without the possibility of a lazy accountant skipping the work.  This matters since missing a fraction of a coin anywhere inside the system will cause the entire accounts of a bank spread across a hundred planets to fail to balance.  I believe the time for all the gears to move would usually be on the order of seconds."

Opalyn is going to have to think at greater length about whether she's willing or able to bring computation and other technology to this civilization, but right now she wants to keep up a steady drumbeat of questions that keep Iilasir interested in the conversation. This is not the right time to get lost in thought.

Right now, all she wants to do is get more information about the technological frontier, while giving up as little of her own advantage as possible.

"How is the entire system of gears and switches powered?"

"Tapping into a planet's core for heat, which boils water into steam, which expands, which drives a metal piston which turns a wheel."

"Does that imply that all accounting machines are housed in buildings close to geothermal power plants?"

"A planet's core is very hot.  A partial portal the width of your least wide finger is wide enough to provide all the heat required."

"How do your people make a 'geothermal power plant' such that it's a notable feature of a town or maybe a planet?"

"Perhaps I've misunderstood. Do you have many of these finger-wide ports, all over the place? Are they very easy for you to drill?"