“Really. You’re asking me to believe that somewhere in the multiverse, a language almost exactly like English independently evolved? And not in an alternate England, but somewhere that sounds completely unrelated to England?”

“If the multiverse is infinite, that’s not a far-fetched claim, is it?” I said.

My phone pinged a couple of times on the way back to my apartment, and I took it out to check for messages when I’d let Permelia in and sat down.

“What are you looking at with your clockmaker’s glass?” she asked.

“What?” I asked.

“The tool you’re holding – I saw you using it to look more closely at the book and coins. I don’t understand what you’re looking at now, though.”

“Oh,” I said. “This is my cell phone. It does a lot of different things, but earlier I was using it as a camera – or as a magnifying glass, I guess. And it looks like my friend replied to the message I sent her earlier with photos of the book and coins.”

Victoria had texted:

Not any writing system I’ve seen before, no. There are a lot of languages in the world, but most of the ones used in printed books or on coinage use writing systems I’d recognize. I’ll ask some colleagues to be sure I’m not missing something. I’d guess some conlanger had them printed and minted as a vanity project, although they could be from some real-world nation I’m less familiar with. Where’d you find them?

“Photo?” Permelia asked.

“That’s a photo,” I said, pointing to the framed photo of me with Victoria and some other friends hanging on the wall. “It’s an exact image made by a machine called a camera. Here,” I said, and showed her the photo of the coins I’d taken earlier.

“Amazing,” she said. “This place is full of such wonders.”

“Let me show you another wonder,” I said. “The safety razor.”

Well, first I showed her hot running water. They didn’t have that where she came from, either. While she bathed, I called Victoria.

“Hey, Jenny, what’s up?”

“A hell of a lot,” I said. “I’m not even sure where to start.”

“Is this about those coins?”

“Yeah. I met this baby trans, she didn’t even know the first thing about where to start with transition, but somehow she’d decided I was the person to ask…”

Victoria interrupted a lot, with increasingly incredulous questions. She tried to find a hole in the logic of my test of Permelia’s magic, but couldn’t figure out how she and the couple who’d lost their keys could have colluded on such short notice. “I still think you should test her some more, next time you see her. I assume you arranged to meet her again?”

“You could say that,” I said. “She’s soaking in my bathtub right now. Later on, I’m going to show her how to shave better.”

“You what.”

“Yeah, she doesn’t have money a hotel would accept, and I didn’t want her to sleep on a park bench or something –”

“I’ll be right over. You need a keeper.”

“The more the merrier.”

By the time Victoria arrived, Permelia had finished bathing and put on the spare bathrobe I’d loaned her, and I’d shown her some tips on shaving her legs, arms and face. In the course of the following conversation, I realized I’d made some provincial assumptions about how similar Wurland’s gender presentation rules were to American ones. For one thing, that skirt (or perhaps I should say kilt?) she’d been wearing was considered male attire where she came from; both men and women could wear either pants and skirts, but the differences were in how loose or tight the trousers were and how long or short the skirts were allowed to be. Women would wear longer skirts – the one she’d been wearing was as long as a “man” could get away with – and were supposed to wear secondary colors, while men wore primary colors. Adult men braided their hair in certain ways, adult women in other ways, and children wore their hair loose; also, people of certain professions (only open to men) shaved their heads or trimmed it short, and women in religious office wore their hair loose like children.

In other words, however determined Permelia was to “become a woman,” she hadn’t dared start presenting female until now. She was eager to learn about our society’s rules and patterns for gender presentation, given that she’d be living here for at least a few years with the fastest possible transition – and going as fast as theoretically possible seemed unlikely with the legal hurdles she’d need to jump through to begin with.

Permelia was nearly done shaving when the doorbell rang. “That must be Victoria,” I said. “I’ll get it.”

I went and let her in. “Oh, good, she hasn’t murdered you in your bed yet,” she said.

“She’s a sweet bebi,” I said. “I’m more convinced of that after spending a few hours with her than I am that she’s a mage from another universe.”

“Jenny, this isn’t like you,” she said. “You’re more hard-headed than this. Bringing home a crazy homeless woman, however nice she seems, is just…” She threw up her hands.

“Judge for yourself,” I said. I went back to check on Permelia, who was pretty much done by now, and came back to the living room with her.

“Hi, I’m Permelia Martford. You must be Victoria.”

“Yes, hi.”

“Jenny said you had a lot of questions.”

“I do. Do you mind if I take a close look at some of the coins you brought? Or that book?”

Permelia nodded. “I brought a couple of books to read while traveling.” She bent down and dug through her backpack, pulling out two smallish hardbound books, which she handed to Victoria, as well as her purse, from which she took out the same four types of coins she’d shown me. Victoria sat down on the sofa with the books and slowly turned the pages of one of them, pausing on the first page past the front matter.

Victoria muttered something technical-sounding under her breath, then looked up at us and said: “I hope you understand why I’m skeptical. Why Jenny was skeptical at first. We haven’t ever heard of dimensional travelers except in fiction, and seeing one for the first time seems less likely than an elaborate hoax, even if it’s not obvious what the motive of the hoax would be.”

“I don’t have enough money to be worth scamming,” I reminded Victoria. “And by your hypothesis that she and the guy in the restaurant and the couple in the furniture store were all working together to scam me, they would have been better off pocketing the money they used to print those books and mint those coins and buy whatever electronic equipment they needed to secretly communicate… all that would cost more than whatever blood they could squeeze out of this turnip.”

Victoria shook her head. “A scam would be more believable. A hoax like this would for the lulz, just to see if they can get you to believe it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

“Okay, and you don’t think the lost keys were extraordinary enough. Fair enough. Feel free to propose another test of her magic, but if it involves going somewhere, let’s save it for tomorrow.” I turned to Permelia and asked, “How much does it tire you out to talk with your, uh, ghostly guides? Are you worn out from doing it a lot today?”

She shook her head. “No, it’s not any more tiring than talking with living folk. I am tired from walking so far in the ways between worlds, but I’m not quite ready to sleep yet.”

“Tell me more about what your ‘guides’ can do,” Victoria said. “Did they teach you how to speak our language, or are they interpreting for us without us noticing or something?”

“No. We speak tongues that are like enough for understanding, at least mostly. I asked the guides to lead me to a place where it was possible to change into a woman and where the folk spoke a tongue I could mostly understand. I’m sure there are many other places where changing into a woman is possible; perhaps in some of them it’s possible to do it faster or less painfully, but nearly all of those places would speak tongues completely unlike ours, or maybe they were too far away to go on foot.”

“Really. You’re asking me to believe that somewhere in the multiverse, a language almost exactly like English independently evolved? And not in an alternate England, but somewhere that sounds completely unrelated to England?”

“If the multiverse is infinite, that’s not a far-fetched claim, is it?” I said.

“It would require not just English to independently evolve in that universe, but all the languages that English borrowed large chunks of vocabulary from or were influenced by the grammar of. Old Norse, Latin, Greek, Norman French, and some sort of Celtic language… I guess that’s possible in an infinite multiverse, but it’s a lot less likely than, say, Hawaiian independently evolving. Which is already astronomically unlikely.”

“If it’s possible, set that aside. What you’re really skeptical about is the magic, right?”

“I’m skeptical about almost every aspect of her story. But that’s the big one. The dimensional travel and the… ghosts she’s supposedly getting information from.”

“All right. Do you have any other ideas we can try tonight?”

“Maybe.” She turned to Permelia, who was looking nervous. “Can your ghosts do sortilegy?”

“I… don’t know that word.”

“Like guide you to open a book to a random page and plunk your finger down on a random word or sentence, and have that be a meaningful answer to a specific question.”

“Oh, yes. I’m not sure it will work with books in your writing, though, and if I did it with one of my own books,” gesturing toward the books in Victoria’s lap, “you might not trust me to tell you what the word I’m pointing at says.”

“Well, let’s give it a try, and if it doesn’t work, we won’t hold it against you,” I said. “Hmm… let’s see…”

“What is my youngest paternal aunt’s favorite book?” Victoria said. “Your ghosts should be able to point it out on one of Jenny’s bookshelves without even pointing to a specific page and word. And,” she added, turning to me, “if she and her accomplices researched you and your friends while planning all this, they’re not likely to have researched my extended family and every detail about them.”

While she was talking, Permelia had been whispering again. She looked around the room and then got up and walked over to the larger of my two bookshelves, the one across from the sofa where most people would put a TV. She hesitated a moment before bending down and taking Anne of Green Gables off the bottom shelf.

“I can’t read what it says, but is this right?” she said, bringing it over to Victoria. My friend didn’t answer right away, just stared at her open-mouthed.

“Okay,” she said. “I have a lot of questions.”

We spent a couple more hours that night answering each other’s questions about our worlds. I wanted to know more about her magic and whether there were other kinds of magic in her world (no), while Victoria wanted to start with the big picture of world history – which Permelia didn’t have much of a global perspective on, unfortunately, though she knew about the last thousand-odd years in her own country and its neighbors, which mostly spoke mutually comprehensible dialects of what she called “Wurlian.” Some of this fit with Victoria’s complaints about how improbable it was for a language so much like English to evolve independently; about eight hundred years ago, Wurland and what are now its neighboring countries had been invaded and conquered by a group of people from the south, who had imposed their own language for administrative use for as long as they remained the ruling class, about two hundred years. And of course Wurlian had borrowed a lot of words from this alternate-Norman French – though not as many, Victoria noted, as our world’s English had. Then a bit later, after that empire had broken up into smaller countries again, about two-thirds of the region’s people had converted to a religion originating further west, and Wurlian borrowed a lot of words from the holy language of that religion, as well as basing new coinages on “Latin” roots.

Permelia had her own questions about the big picture of our world, but she still focused most of her curiosity on the transition process and the place of trans people in our world. She was dismayed to learn how badly trans people were often treated, but that didn’t change her mind about transitioning as soon and as thoroughly as possible.

When I noticed Permelia yawning, I hustled Victoria out the door, promising to call her in the morning once Permelia and I were done with breakfast and ready to go shopping. “And maybe she can show us some of the other things she talked about, afterward,” I added.

“Yeah, that wouldn’t hurt,” Victoria said. “Good night, you two.”

I got out the spare sheets and blanket from the closet, and took one of the extra pillows from my bed and put a clean pillowcase on it. Soon Permelia was snoring lightly on my sofa, while I was lying in bed, buzzing with wonder and excitement. It took me a long time to get to sleep; it was a good thing I had the next day off.

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