"So this is what it looks like..."

Even though it was my first time looking at the map of this continent, it felt strangely familiar. I needed to think for a while, but I realized why.

"Oh, it's Spain," I stated. The proportions were skewed, but the rectangle shape was similar, only the topography was different.

"Should I call for Lambert to ease your pain, lady Nati?" Fenna asked anxiously. The word was unknown to the people here.

"No, no." I protested. "It just reminds me of the Iberian peninsula from my world. I wonder if that place exists in the same universe?"

"You're right, now I can see it too, but this continent is about two thousand miles across." Alexandra seemed familiar with my world's geography. "I would go as far as to say it's the same planet, just a different plane of existence. The rotation speed and orbit match so it can't be coincidental. Bur the Cranta calendar has thirteen months with twenty-eight days each, which makes lot more sense than what your world had."

"It even has that little protrusion where Gibraltar would be." I was fascinated by the similarities, but my brain couldn't take in everything.

"That place is often referred to as Hell." Charlotte volunteered to fill me in. It was a relatively primitive map without detailed topography, just token symbols of mountain peaks drawn all over. Rivers and some old borders were also marked out, the names of notable places written over. The letters looked strange, but I understood their meaning.

"Sounds ominous," I noted, looking at the beastfolk's gift. Their volunteers brought it from Fenna's village but were busy building.

"It is a literal arctic hellscape." Omerta butted in. "Beyond the Gates of Hell, it's all just impassable mountains and snow."

"Arctic? But it's down south..." I was confused. The Spain I knew was a nice and warm place. She couldn't answer me though, getting dragged out by Hana to help with cooking. Fenna left moments later to prepare food, even though the village had plenty of chefs now but more mouths to feed too. Lunchtime was close, and my stomach growled.

"The equator runs through the middle of this map," Alexandra explained, tracing it with her finger. "And it is surrounded by the Sea of Storms. The northern and southern ends are temperate, but the currents make the south colder. The north is relatively livable but the middle is mostly desert or otherwise too hot for humans to live in."

"And where are we then?" I looked around curiously.

"We are right here." Charlotte pointed to where Leon would have been in my world. It was high up north and slightly to the west. "North from us is the Kingdom of Nordhaben. It hugs most of the coast from here to there. It is home to tall, blonde humans with blue eyes, and their capital is now called Sanctuary, most of humanity retreated there."

It was as far from us as Oviedo would be from Leon on the map but I had to remind myself that the actual distances were four times that.

"It's one of the smaller kingdoms, dwarfed next to the Great Kingdom of Saipole." Alex pointed to the east, roughly from where France would have met the Spanish border, way below the equator. "Their people had dark hair and narrow eyes, seeing themselves as superior to all other races... Raiding them and enslaving the people of Nordhaben and Shibalan until the last Pantheon War, when the tables have turned."

"The Sea of Storms shallowed their massive armada," Charlotte explained. "It became impossible to sail, and their economy crumbled. They were the first to be conquered by the emerging Crantans."

"So many of them were sold into slavery that nowadays you can barely see their kind." The Goddess said. "A slave contract would make you sterile, so they nearly died out. When the orcs and goblins became widespread, they took their place, and Cranta banned human slavery."

I had doubts about remembering much of this history lesson, but I found myself glancing at Alexandra more and more. She spent most of her time away from the village, and when she was here, I got distracted by her.

"The seven kingdoms had different ethnicities ruling over them." She continued. "Although thanks to the Gates, they did mix, at least in the capitals. So the next one below is Shibalan, slightly darker skin color than in Saipole, but not as dark as the people of Lansum."

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"They had the largest human population of the continent within the Empire. Wonder how many survived the Collapse?" Charlotte pondered. She turned into a living encyclopedia. "They weren't a unified country per se but fought long and hard against Cranta. They were the last to be conquered in the Second Great Continental War, the nomadic tribes of Appenon to the south, and Lansum southwest fell in the brutal first one."

"Cranta struggled to conquer them as well. Most gods they worship date back to those two wars." Alexandra noted. "Nordhaben joined them in a personal union after the conquest of Saipole, and they easily subjugated Torpen to the northwest, where the dwarves lived."

"The dwarves just didn't care who ruled the surface. I heard that after the collapse, they merely pulled back inside their mountains, that were never conquered." Charlotte expanded on it. This was more information I could handle already, but they still kept going. "Appenon ceased to exist."

"I did see their tribesman in Lansum," Alex noted. "And they say their god, Addas, might return soon, now that Cranta is gone."

"Are there a lot of gods?" I asked curiously. Charlotte explained how one could become a deity but only talked about the Cranta Pantheon. "What happened to the ones that got banished?"

"I don't want to know. Maybe they got sealed off in a pocket dimension." The Goddess of Luck shrugged. "I'd be bored to death in there. The rest that left on their own created a higher plane for themselves, but no idea how many of them are still there."

"Gods and entire Pantheons can be forgotten and slowly die out. We can only speculate about the elven deities that came a millennia before the humans even existed." Charlotte mentioned. "After the Cranta Pantheon was established and the Pact was formed, they approached the other religions to make them sign it. They either banished or merged the other gods into their own Pantheon until nobody else left."

"The people of Saipole forsake their gods." Alex chirped in. "And Nordhaben's were slowly integrated. This was after the last Pantheon wars, so the humans had enough of the rampaging deities."

"Addas was the only one remaining independent before the Goddess of Luck. Unknown where he left this world?" Charlotte was full of information, and I couldn't help but ask more questions.

"And what is a pocket dimension?" It sounded too cool to pass.

"Have you seen that magical item Lambert brought with him?" Alex asked. I recalled some oddity but tried not to think about that guy. His attack on me was not to be easily forgotten... "I think he gave one to the ogre when they left. It's called a Bag of Holding. It’s a small extradimensional space you can take anywhere and use to store your items without carrying them on your back."

"One of those small bags can easily hold a ton or more," Charlotte added, and my jaw dropped. I noticed they took out or put more food into them than what seemed possible, but one ton…

"They are created from magic stones found inside what human adventurers used to call dungeons." The Goddess of Luck started to turn into the Goddess of Information. These were the interesting facts, dungeons, and magic, not the boring history classes. "They were tears within the fabric of reality caused by massive concentrations of mana, usually near or inside the larger cities."

"Once conquered, these extradimensional places would leave behind their core crystals, so in a certain sense, a Bag of Holding is a little piece of an old dungeon." Charlotte went into the details. "The core crystal is broken up into smaller shards and with a proper technique, magically attached inside one such bag. They used to be common."

"Ugh, I kind of want to have one now. Sounds super useful." I got enthusiastic. Alex giggled, which in turn raised my heart rate a bit.

"Anyway, I bet you wouldn't want to live inside one for the rest of your life." She said after a short pause. "That's what I'd imagine, being banished would be like. But since I can teleport, I could probably escape that too. I'd just rather not try... I have my limits."

To think, that I almost ended up like that, thanks to that human wizard boy. It sent a chill down my spine but also raised the question.

"So how come Lambert failed to banish me?" I asked next.

"Beats me." Was her first reaction, but she kept pondering. "Banishment is a pretty advanced spell, and I haven't learned it myself, but if I had to guess, it might be because he tried to banish the wrong person. Or because you didn't have enough mana for it to succeed, or that body is still anchored to me, so he would have to banish us both at once? I'm just theorizing here, it’s best not to know."

"I would think that entering and exiting pocket dimensions must be easy compared to full-blown teleportation," Charlotte interjected, being the former slave of a mage. "My master said something about True Names too, which was indispensable for banishment."

"Ah, that could be it. Then he tried to banish you with my True Name." Alex had her moment of realization, but it all went over my head. "Hmm, maybe just to be on the safer side, I'll use a spell on him to forget my name. Although he doesn't seem like someone who'd try again."

"I don't trust him," I noted just for the record. "And I keep catching him staring at me, like he's planning something, or I don't know..."

"He does, huh?" The Goddess giggled. For some reason this made me blush a little. "Reminds me of Gitaut, back in the Magic Academy. You better get used to it, people find my tail and ears irresistible."

"I'll never get used to them..." I come to a realization as well. "I keep forgetting that I'm in your body. It feels natural yet strange, and I experience things I never did in my previous life..."

"Oh, just go easy on that, okay?" She winked, making me blush even harder. She failed to suppress a hearty giggle. "Don't want you to overdose on experimenting with that body, if you know what I mean."