Iman nods thoughtfully as she leads them out and back to the stairs. "I've been getting the impression that a lot of worlds have limited their scientific study to just - study," she says. "Well, and experimentation and proofs and whatnot. But it's kind of a passive reading-and-learning relationship regardless. Even with the experiments, it's mostly facilitating events and observing results."

She pulls Rashad aside to make room for a pair of agents coming down the stairs past them, then she continues up, keeping a grip on his hand.

"In my universe we broke that barrier a long time ago. Most of our scientists have developed capabilities to directly impact, well, reality." She shrugs. She can treat this sort of explanation like she would talking to a non-scientific person back home - the scientific world was always very insular, and looked at from the outside as something weird and fantastical, but even the most ignorant citizen knew more about it than the people she meets here. She's never really prepared for how weird it all sounds to them.

"My field was empirical alchemy," she says. "Transmutation of information. The details are rather... nuanced." She's not saying you're stupid, Rashad, she's just saying she doesn't have time right now. "That's how I tell computers what to do."