Deep in Deviskaryl's forest, where people rarely go, there's a lake, unremarkable but for the beach on the west side, where she's been practicing the sort of gentle sandy slope and tiered dropoff that makes for the best swimming hole. She's got her technique down just about perfectly, ready to deploy on beaches needing a touchup in a few weeks when summer is over, and is just practicing for speed and efficiency now; she pauses in her work when the sun begins to set, watching it through the augmented eyesight of dozens of cats, only a sliver of her attention still on the lake, considering how she might shave off another minute or another bit of effort.
All at once there's a mirror-sheen sphere just above the beach for a fraction of a second forcing the air out of the way. Then a fraction of a second after the sphere appears it vanishes leaving behind a young woman dressed in an aqua sundress with bare feet. She lands easily on the beach. There's a satchel slung across her shoulders and a set of intricate bracelets on her wrists. There's also a small disk in her left hand. "Well, this is as beautiful as I imagined," she muses to herself, "Didn't expect the beach though, that's new."
The young woman drops the disk in her hand into her satchel and stretches on of her bracelets over her hand. Water picks itself up out of the lake and swirls around her in an intricate pattern. "Hm, so the magic that's floating everywhere doesn't stop me from moving things. I wonder what it's doing?"
"Deviskaryl," the voice comes from nowhere in particular, formed of several overlapping languages but perfectly comprehensible anyway. "Goddess of forest and self-actualization. The blessing allows you to understand the body language of animals. How did you come to be here?"
"Yes. That's true of all gods, here; we each have a domain and a terrain type and a focus, and the ability to modify our domains and make human and animal avatars, and to bestow up to six blessings on whoever we like and one larger power on ourselves and our acolytes if we choose to have them, and a few other miscellaneous powers."
"The short version is that I can teach magic to recognize things and then do things when it recognizes them. The long version includes all the various basic things magic can do, most of which are really dangerous if you don't use them carefully, and all the things other people over the years have taught magic how to recognize."
"If you're using the magic in it's most basic form there's no safeguards. If you tell it to push on you and you don't specify how it could snap your neck. If you tell it to freeze time in an area that you're partially inside it'll cut your hand off. Warnings to prevent you from doing that are things you need to add intentionally."
"Perhaps, copying magic isn't always straightforwards though. I suppose it's possible that eventually there will be some problem caused by stuffing too many languages in my head but I only have five so far and I've heard of people speaking more than that without any magic involved."
"Perhaps, but magic is quite abundant on your world. I wouldn't expect it to be an obstacle here. That said you haven't been consuming magic while I watch, and in fact you're shedding some. Maybe your magic is very unlike mine. It has something of a different aesthetic than the magic I've seen before too."
"It wants people who are smart and I think the second criteria is motivated or maybe steadfast, the third and fourth criteria are about your goals or morals, it's hard to figure out what those are selecting for but looking back over the notes my predecessors have left it looks like it's somehow selecting for people who are well intentioned as one of those criteria. I'm not sure what the last one is or if both the third and fourth can be summed up as well intentioned when taken together. One of the artifacts I brought with me will tell me who meets which criteria."
Luna unslings her satchel and rummages around in it for a few moments before finding a disk covered in strange glyphs and five circles. She sets it in the palm of her hand then concentrates. All five light up. "That's reading off of me, just to confirm it didn't get damaged since the last time I used it. I don't think you count as specifically here enough for it to give me a readout on you. I tried pointing it at your cat self but it doesn't see that in and of itself as a person."
"It's nice, I think this agrees with me better than what I was doing when I got copied by the magic. I like seeing new places and meeting new people and doing that was expensive in the place I used to call home. Now I can get food from magic in a pinch, but usually I carry some with me and trade in favors."
"Hm, what I can do with magic is a long list. I fly or levitate things up to a total of about three times my weight, though my precision suffers the more weight I'm lifting. I can also do something a lot like teleporting, but it takes time to plan a series of jumps if I want to go somewhere really specific. I can bring air with me underwater or into space. I can make objects or dissolve them into magic and turn them into other things. I can freeze time in small areas. That isn't a complete list of the magics I have premade but it's all the big ones. I can make new magics if I have enough time to think about it and figure out what I'm trying to do though."
"Much, thank you." The tabby settles herself comfortably, much more mindful of her claws than a real cat would be.
"Cresthill is south-southeast of here - on your left, just a bit to the right of where that tree is starting to turn gold - but if you bear east of that, you'll find one of the main roads leading to it without overshooting if you get lost."
Even at speed it's over an hour's flight. The view is pretty, all late summer foliage just beginning to turn color - not that she'll necessarily be able to see it, in the dark - and a couple times they can see the glow of a smaller town in the distance; Deviskaryl provides periodic course corrections when Luna begins to drift.
"You could tell me about the other worlds you've visited, if you like," she comments after a while.
"The last world I visited was very built around it's magic system. You could do magic rituals to transform some materials into other more useful forms and a lot of what I would tend to expect to be done by artisans or manual labor was done by various magic rituals or by flowers that were created using magic rituals."
"My original world was a place without any magic, but they had advanced technology that could do incredible things. Most people were very accustomed to those things so they didn't seem incredible anymore but especially now that I've seen other worlds I really appreciate them. We could talk to someone on the other side of the planet for very little money and with virtually no delay. We built large flying machines that could carry us over oceans in comfort and at great speed. There were thousands of other little conveniences as well. There were also costs, prices we paid for mistakes we made getting to that point."
"That's an interesting thought. I don't know what would happen if I tried to introduce a real goddess to my world. People worship all sorts of gods there but I don't think any of them are real. They tend to be these very big vague things that don't do anything conclusively attributable to them. People are very attached to them anyway though."
"That sounds unpleasant."
"What I could do, actually, would be modify some plants - a few species, probably, for different climates and things - to take care of that, and then people could plant them all over, beyond what I could claim as domain. That will take some work, I haven't done anything that complex before, but it'll be much more efficient in the long run than doing it directly."
"Not very much compared to what you're used to, I expect. There've been a couple of big improvements on waterwheel machines recently, though, and people are working on new designs to take advantage of that, and I hear someone has come up with something that makes books without having to write them out, but we don't have one yet."
"I'd guess that's a type of printing press. The older ones used fully carved pages while the newer ones have a bunch of individual letters that could be moved. In my time we've replaced both with machines that can place ink precisely where you want it based on designs made on things called computers."
"Yeah, I don't entirely understand how computers or printers work myself. I think printers need special inks that don't bleed to work. Computers are... somehow they use really tiny arrangements of electrical stuff to do math and then build on that math to do much more complicated things."
"...oh, that is interesting. I still don't see how you'd get from there to lightning, but it does suggest how you might get math from a machine - it'd be something like a very simple abacus, where the bead triggers part of the machine to act somehow." She considers. "If the lightning is just to power it somehow, we might not need that at all, I bet it'd be possible to make a waterwheel machine that worked that way."
"Waterwheels are, well, a big wheel, turned by a stream of water, usually a river, and then you can add a shaft and gears to power any kind of machine that can work on turning power. The simplest kinds grind flour or draw water, but they're useful for lots of things - mostly that kind of mechanical work, pounding ore to be smelted or grinding wood for paper or what have you, but there's no reason you couldn't use it for something where the machine itself is the interesting part."
"Mmhmm. If you're going to be staying for a while you'll probably want to set up shop there yourself, that's where the inventors are and I expect they'll be the most interested in your magic, both learning it and finding uses for it. Cresthill is still nice, though, just a bit slower paced."
Warehouses, stables, inns; shops catering to travelers, mostly closed for the night. A good number of cats wandering around, all mundane. It's not a touristy part of town, obviously enough, but there are benches and decorative flourishes on things and a tiny park visible up the road.
"Is there any particular type of person you'd like to work with, or cargo you'd like to take or avoid?"
Around the corner and up two streets, with occasional further communication-twinkles when the cat begins to get distracted. He sniffs at the door of an inn - possibly The Drunken Crow, from the picture on the sign - and meows once, loudly, before trotting off.
"You might want to do your translation magic now."
"Alright, I'll need to put you down first." Luna puts down the cat she was carrying gently and looks through her satchel before pulling out a small cube with intricate patterns on it. She runs her fingers along the sides of the cube and winces. Then she speaks again this time in the most common local dialect. "Seems to be working." She drops the cube back in her bag. "Do you want me to pick you back up?"
And in she goes, making a beeline for a table near the middle of the room and hopping daintily from floor to chair to tabletop, attracting attention but mostly not outright stares from the patrons.
The tavern itself is mostly fairly generic, but nicely decorated, with painted landscapes on the walls and blue glass candleholders etched with a leaf pattern on the tables. A small shrine is set up in one corner; several candles arranged around a statue of a cat on a small table draped with a green cloth, with a collection of objects arranged in front of it.
"Of course. Where would you like to start?"
(The cat rolls back over, rubs her head on the waitress's hand one more time, takes a piece of meat from the saucer, and heads for the door; when she gets there, she drops the morsel and meows to be let out, which she promptly is.)