Illia averts her eyes from boob, flushing slightly.

Hmm.

"You have such a great baby."

"I know! Thank you for saving her."

"I just wish I could save more. Blast Tapa for having such good babymurder-related infosec."

"Can't magically find out stuff about that?"

"No, 'babies are sometimes murdered here' isn't an inherent feature of the place such that magic could use it to identify it."

"What does inherent mean for magic -"

"Like--magic inherently 'knows' things about, like, the laws of physics and physical structures and stuff, but not higher-level concepts like murder."

"Huh."

"So when you tell it to heal something it's going off what you mean by healing, not some atomic definition."

"But it can fill in when I don't know much."

"Some, yeah, since it has your body to consult for how these things work."

"But we're different species."

"We work disturbingly similarly."

"Spooky. Does that mean it'd be safe for me to, like, fuck with springtime hormones, but not you -"

"Not necessarily. I know what I'm doing, I can get the magic to use your body as a template instead of mine."

"Oh, neat."

"Mhm!"

"What other things would I be learning if I were a serious magic person?"

"Mostly it depends what kind, we have tracks, but there's tricks for doing magic efficiently that generalize."

"Ooh?"

"Like thinking about things in as much detail as possible, and..." and she lists a few more.

Peka writes them down on her everything with the hand that isn't holding Katin to boob.

"Hungry little critter."