Packing those feelings in a box, he asked Fera where he should go to find information about the world over breakfast. She told him about a library somewhere in the city, or he could go learn directly from the priests of Yeran, the Goddess of Education. Given his direct invitation to go and meet all of the Gods and Goddesses, Grayson decided that the temple of Yeran was probably a good idea, as well as being relatively close by. It was time for him to address what was probably the core of all of his feelings.
Grayson was adrift. On Earth, Mars, or wherever the hell in time and space he'd been for the past fifty years of travelling, he'd known when and where he was. He'd known how that fit into the rest of his civilization. Most importantly, he'd known where and when home was and exactly how far away it was. It had been a source of incredible comfort for him, knowing that no matter where and when he was, he still had a home.
Here, he didn't have his old home. He didn't know when his home planet would be settled, or even if it ever would. He didn't know if the galaxy it rested in even existed in this universe, though the night sky was almost visibly indistinguishable from the same place in his old universe. So he wanted some kind of tether, and since he couldn't tether himself to his past, he may as well try to tie himself on to theirs. He had a new home. Now he just needed to make it feel like an old one.
When Fera asked if he wanted her to come, Grayson was surprised.
"It was never a huge thing, but do you have any duties that you need to perform for the temple here?" he asked. Fera laughed at him.
"No. Any permanent duties I took on would by superseded by my role as your companion voice. Any time you leave this temple, if you want me with you, I go with you. Grayson, in more than one way, you have become the second most important thing in my life... After our Lady, of course." Fera beamed at him as she emphasized "our." She was still extremely happy that Grayson had accepted a contract with her Goddess. Almost as happy as she was that Perimis apparently fully endorsed their relationship, which was another source of pressure for...
Back in the box for now.
"Is there anything you want to do here?" asked Grayson. Fera frowned performatively at him pressing the issue, so he continued. "I meant what I said yesterday. I love having you with me, but what I need to do today... I don't want to bore you. You probably know much of what I want to learn about already. If you want to come with me, then by all means come with me. I just want you to know that I don't want to just drag you around to places you don't want to go or to do things that you don't want to do."
Fera got up and walked around the table to hug him.
"That's more consideration than most people give. It's one of the reasons that I want to be with you. You could have asked me to go with you without thinking for a second about what I want, and I would have gone. But you really do care enough to ask if there's anything else I want. Today at least, the answer is no. Besides..." Fera pulled back from the hug and winked. "As long as I'm following you around, I don't have to do any work. It's a win-win for me."
The pair laughed and joked as they finished their breakfast. They left the temple dining hall and headed to the temple of Yeran, it's doors a sky blue with an icon of a blank scroll wrapped around a calligraphy brush. When they entered, they were greeted by a young man in priests robes that matched the doors. The man was shorter than Fera, but strong looking. He looked less like a scholar and more like an archeologist, someone who spent long hours squatting or on their knees, carefully brushing away the dirt of millennia. His white hair was disheveled over his dark skin and pointed ears. He introduced himself as Dremgin.
Dremgin brought them back to a room that had obviously been prepared for the purpose of teaching a specific person a specific set of lessons. There were rolled up maps, scrolls, and a series of books in a tall stack. The covers said things like "The rise and fall of Nustrel," "A History of Kamrellian Society," and "From the Bertas to the Ocean: Kingdoms of the Subcontinent." It was some of the many things an avid speed reader could use to near instantly get a grasp of the history of whatever this world was called. It was at this point that Grayson realized that nobody had actually told him the name of the world they were living on, the continent the empire was on, or the name of the empire itself.
Skimming the books for a prelude took only a few minutes. Then the maps came. First was a map of the continent they were on with approximate borders drawn for the different countries. The continent looked to be approximately the right size and shape for Europe, but with some weirdly geometric bits of coastline. It turned out that when you had Gods and dark Gods battling for supremacy, mages of near divine power, and vast reserves of magical materials, nuclear weapons could be the size of the average person. Then the scrolls came out, giving Grayson more details about how certain societies actually worked.
Finally, because when your student can skim a book and read the entire thing in less than thirty seconds typical lesson plans become pretty useless, they did a question/answer session where Grayson and Fera just asked about stuff and Dremgin... did his best. He was a teacher. He was ready to teach a lesson, then assign Grayson some reading for homework. He was not ready for Grayson to walk in, dump his lesson plan in the trash by explaining that he could read any book in seconds and flip through the entire stack. In Grayson's words, the story goes something like this:
In the beginning, things were pretty much the same as my world, except there was magic. Big bang, billions of years of nothingness, yada yada, moving on to the good stuff. Now it's time to get funky, because this Earth didn't take over a billion years to form. It took a few minutes. Gods, huh. But Grayson, one might ask, doesn't that mean that civilizations have been around for over a billion years on this planet? No. Because the Gods didn't make civilizations. They made bacteria. That whole shit of "how did life begin on Earth?" Solved here.
So, skipping a few hundred million years of evolution, there were a couple of civilizations that did rise, did develop, did get to the nuclear age, and then did nuke themselves into oblivion. What do we know about these civilizations? There's a general outline of the story, being that they started like most do, grow up to have cities, then connect those cities and make countries, then make empires, then go to war, then their descendants regret it for a few hundred thousand years. In doing so, they changed the outlines of the continents, which is why a certain boot shaped country in Europe looks more like a stiletto heel, among other changes, like a mountain range that stretches from Northern England across most of the continent separating two empires that really don't like each other. Also England isn't an island. The North Sea, Baltic Sea, and Gulf of Bothnia are all just land.
Anyway, skipping forward to the time after the latest in a long series of apocalyptic calamities, humans, elves, orcs, dark elves, halflings, animal people, and a shit load of other sentient species evolved. According to the Gods, some of those are descendants of the long extinct civilizations, however the Gods aren't telling anyone who that is, because the last time they did that, there was some self-righteous genocide. Really, it's not hard to see why they nuked themselves. They were almost certainly assholes.
Our panoply of surprisingly compatible intelligent species followed pretty normal societal growth patterns. They build villages by rivers because food and water, those grow, they absorb nomad populations and become subsistence farmers and then cities. Some of those cities got magically nuked, because magic lets you shortcut past the medieval era, renaissance era, industrial age, and the splitting of the atom and jump straight to a three hundred megaton blast. A dark god of destruction apparently helped with that.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
But we've managed to make it to cities. Cities developed on six out of seven continents because Antarctica is still a beautiful frozen wasteland, with one in Australia, three in Africa, two in Europe, seven in Asia, two in North America, and fucking twelve in South America. Magic, huh. Yeah, while our civilization got kickstarted from about 8 cities, they started with twenty seven. Twenty seven different ancient cities dotted the world around six thousand years before today. Much like modern Earth, they aren't really relevant to what goes on today, so we're still running at the macro level here.
Five cities were destroyed by war, two of those being magically nuked. Another died out because of famine. But still, twenty one different civilizations getting to the bronze age is pretty good. Unfortunately for them, only two of them discovered iron. More unfortunately for them, smaller villages and towns also discovered iron and banded together against the ruling class of those cities that took a bunch of their food each year. When the dust settled on a time in history referred to as the "Crumbling Walls Period" only three of the old civilizations still had anything resembling a city. That was between 5500 and 4000 years before the present day... with rounding.
The end of the crumbling walls period heralded the beginning of the local iron age, which lasted surprisingly long. This is because iron is weird when it comes to magic. It's great for making swords, armor, skillets, and stuff like that out of. Unfortunately, if you wear iron you start losing your sense of magic. It's a bit like stuffing cotton wool in your ears. Alright, you might ask, then why did the cities and villages and towns that discovered iron have so much of an advantage over the other cities when the iron age started? Because most people don't use magic, and most of the really powerful mages don't actually like committing genocide. In a gargantuan twist of irony, at least one city was destroyed because an individual had a conscience.
The iron age ended around one thousand years ago. The major players were pretty much set at that point, so we'll go over them here.
In North America! Also known as... Muchaco.
The North where Canada used to be is pretty much still nomadic tribes. Nobody was particularly interested in going there, except some parts of the prairies were settled for the good growing land.
The US and Mexico area is pretty well divided among thirty different smaller kingdoms. Nobody rules the whole thing and they redraw the borders yearly.
Central America has a lovely little kingdom that decided something like the Panama canal was a great idea and so became a trading empire by charging people money to sail through their new strait.
South America! Or in this world... Porital.
There's an empire that covers most of the Northern two thirds. It started as a bunch of small kingdoms like North America, but steadily grew and absorbed the smaller kingdoms. It's called Buritia, and it's apparently a very nice place.
The rest of South America is mostly small coastal kingdoms separated by the Andes.
Europe! Sometimes referred to as... Haligan.
The Muric empire covers the entire North, down to the set of mountains that crosses the middle of England, laterally across the whole continent all the way to the Urals. It started as a bunch of tribes that were slowly unified by an evil dickbag who everyone is pretty sure worshipped one of the dark gods. The well documented history of child sacrifices supports this claim.
South of that set of mountains and actually covering most of the Roman empire at it's height, stretching down even farther into North Africa is my new home, the Derantel empire. Their royal family actually traces back to an ancient city on the Nile. Technically, most of Europe is owned by Egyptians.
Africa! Commonly called... Efrika.
This made me, Grayson, remember I'm still telling this story and not the narrator, laugh out loud. It's basically just Africa but in a bad South African accent.
Anyway, there were a few kingdoms scattered around. Were being the operative word because now there's the... and get this... South Efrikan Empire. It doesn't even have South Africa the country in it. That's still independent and called Jantimur.
Australia is all one big kingdom now, but most of it is still unpopulated, just like home. Both the kingdom and the continent is called Ghorett. The wildlife is actually worse than Australia. Imagine if Aussie crocs could polymorph. You're walking down the road and you see something normal like a traffic cone. You go to move it out of traffic and the damn thing turns back into a crocodile and goes for you. And the spiders are bigger... not just bigger than normal spiders, although they are... bigger than people. And they live in colonies. Seriously, fuck that.
Lastly we have Asia... It's Luminta.
The Middle East is still a collection of minor kingdoms. South Asia is an empire that changes name every dynasty to match their emperor, but everyone outside that depravity calls them Kilmur. East Asia is a collection of kingdoms that actually all formed an alliance, marking this as a unique place where China, Japan, and Korea don't hate each other. Northern and Western Russia are owned by the Muric and Derantel empires.
Antarctica is just referred to as "The land of ice. Why bother naming it?" Considering our universe called it basically "not bear land" that's fair.
Anyway, over the last thousand years, we got the steel age, which also happened to include the forging of tungsten, titanium, aluminum, mythril, and adamantium through magic because skipping steps in natural processes is what that shit's for. Throughout all this time, there's a lot that's been done through magic stones with various types of mana in them. Hot stones and cold stones, wind stones that continuously make a breeze, light stones that just produce light, dark stones that make everyone around them feel sick so people tend to break those ones and use them for arrowheads. There's also earth stones, which are just really dense stones. People break those and use them for slingshot ammunition or catapult ammunition.
The last two types of mana are weird. You have magic and anti-magic, which is different from pure untyped mana. In terms of electrical charge, magic mana is positively charged and anti-magic mana is negatively charged. When they interact, their mana nullifies and they either detonate or fizzle depending on the amount of mana involved. Pure mana has no charge, so a magic mana attack hitting an anti-magic mana barrier would explode probably, while the same attack hitting a pure mana barrier would just do nothing. Both stones store magic extremely well, but the stones interact like spells would, meaning that if you touch a charged magic stone and a charged anti-magic stone, the effect would be a large explosion... which has also previously destroyed a city with a multi megaton magical nuke. Fucking magic shortcuts.
So, moving from one thousand years to now, culture has progressed slightly. Porin the Reformer set up the Duties in the Derantel empire, which prompted the empire to grow to where it sits now. Technically it's still growing with a small kingdom in what would normally be central Mongolia currently debating whether it wants to stay independent or join the empire. It's mostly grown through consent instead of conquest, with the only likely change from that policy being a seemingly inevitable war with the Muric empire to it's North. In the South, it's trading solidly with the South Efrikan empire, and maintaining positive relations with Jantimur for as long as it's ships pass around Southern Efrika for trade.
In not-the-Americas Porital is pretty well settled with Buritia starting to slowly expand down the Western side of the Andes. Muchaco is... not. They are still having regular border disputes in the kingdoms up there, with the Demsim Kingdom sitting on their canal making tons of money. That brings us pretty much up to date.
Yeran was amused at the plight of his priest. He'd known this would be a trial for the man, who had thought himself an excellent teacher. When tasked with being the one to teach Grayson, he had believed himself greatly honored. He had believed that it was his great ability that would see him elevated through cultivating such a connection.
Yeran was not elevating the man. She was educating him. She was, after all the Goddess of Education. Today, she was teaching hubris and humility.
Following the lesson, Grayson and Fera left the emotionally exhausted Dremgin collapsed behind a desk in his study.
"Was that wrong? I didn't want to waste time, so I figured we should probably just do what made sense." Grayson sighed. Fera was doing her best to suppress her giggles. She was failing, but it was the thought that counted.
"When he learned that you could just absorb books... How do you even do that?" Fera lost her battle and bent over laughing. She remembered the flabbergasted look on Dremgin's face, then laughed even harder. Grayson patted her shoulder.
"Come on, is it even surprising at this point?" he asked.
"Of course not. It's just hilarious. The look on his face! And then when he didn't believe you and tried to quiz you! The pompous ass was so full of himself to start off with." They stopped in the corridor so Grayson could help keep Fera on her feet. She looked ready to fall over. Slowly she got a hold of herself.
The lesson had taken ten hours with an unscheduled break for lunch served by an acolyte. They hadn't even left the room. Grayson had some private suspicions about who was being taught here.
Eventually, the pair made it outside and found a lovely quiet restaurant for dinner. They held hands all the way there.
even more recently given the green light to marry the almost literal demigod who embodies the teaching of her actual goddess, who also happens to have been the one to save her from that second thing. Fera had been ignoring a certain facet of life and now she's fully into it (helped along by her aforementioned goddess pushing her into it).