"It is! What's the approximate range on your weird sense, I wonder if it's safe to teach you how to fly a scoot..."

"Couple hundred feet sharpish and blurrier for another couple hundred feet."

"Hmm. Well, maybe."

"- I'd like to check if I can read."

"—that's a good idea. Uh—"

He makes a gesture and says a thing and a readout of the current time appears in the air in Leraal numerals, ticking along every few seconds.

She breathes a sigh of relief. "Good translation artifact."

"Oh good."

"Yeah that would have been bad. I write a lot."

"I wouldn't like to be blind and deaf but I would really really not like to be blind, deaf, and consequently illiterate," Mial agrees.

"Yeah this could have been way worse. There's pairs of artifacts that just straight up kill you - I guess some of those I might not have noticed yet - a single artifact won't do that at least."

"...there's pairs of artifacts that not only straight-up kill you but also wait a while before doing that so you can't be confident they aren't going to??"

"It'd be like, there's one that makes you need to sleep for twenty hours a day, it'd combine badly with one that gave you insomnia."

"Well that's terrible."

"Yeah. I don't think any of the drawbacks I've noticed have obvious collisions though."

"It doesn't sound like it. And you've even got at least one mitigation, with the language thing versus the eliminated senses."

"Yep. Depending on which drawback it goes with the translation artifact could be really popular."

"Around here there's translation spells, but if I remember right, wizardry plain doesn't work outside of Elcenia."

"Do you have contact with a lot of worlds here?"

"Not habitually! Interworld magic is more of a theoretical discipline than anything, I only know anything about it because I'm insatiably curious."

"Is it going to be intractably expensive to ever see my parents again?"

"Shouldn't be. My mother's a retired research wizard and her area of focus was teleport spells; even if there doesn't currently exist a way to contact them, with a little reading we can come up with one."

"It's just I can't think of a reason to have inexpensively accessible access to other worlds with different magic and technology and not be finding lots of them to interact with."

"It's been decades since I picked up a book on this but to my recollection one of the major hurdles is specifying a world - like, it's possible to do 'random' but that's hardly a guarantee of good results - and spell invention is a decidedly nontrivial effort and interworld stuff tends to be high-cost, which means most people either can't safely cast it or don't really want to. I think I entertained an idle thought of establishing interworld contact but the only relevant spell I could get my hands on at the time was 'summon a random person from a random world with no warning', which has, uh, obvious ethical issues."

"Yes, a bit. Well. Maybe my getting hit with a van will turn out to be a marvelous opportunity."

"Maybe so."