"Couldn't possibly guess," he admits. "Don't know why it wouldn't be, though. If this place is all from one time of its own, then - well, even then, if they can pull things from other times, they could advance themselves rapidly."

That's a puzzle and one that is probably beyond him to solve, at least for now. He's no idiot, but there's so much to keep up with and he's had so little time for it.

"We don't have magic back home," he explains. "I know that there are places with what I thought were incredible advancements, but nothing that could leave our world and go to others. Nothing that could create an artificial person as real as Viveca."

To his knowledge, anyway. Who knows what the world's top minds are working on in their classified laboratories. The little glimpses he had heard were always fascinating, but also easy to dismiss as exaggeration; stories blown out of proportion by people who are used to dealing with the fantastic in their daily lives already.