"Sure."

So he gets one of the kits and goes outside and flips to the cloth diagram in the recipe book and paints, carefully, wearing gloves, double-checking every line.

A pile of cloth appears.

"I usually don't wear the gloves for it but you're, like, not supposed to touch the ink," he says.

"Setting a good example for us more damageable folks," she nods.

"That's the idea! So now you've got cloth. Want to try painting some more? Or, actually - want to try painting something really simple and easy like dirt or water?"

"Probably a good idea to start there," she acknowledges.

"Yeah."

Here is the plate, here is the paintbrush, here are the inks, here's the recipe for a pile of dirt.

She fetches and tugs on a pair of the heavy gloves, and: then there is dirt.

"Congratulations!"

"Hooray! Magic that's likely to be useful a double-digit number of times in my life!"

Tiro laughs.

"Well, that's not wholly fair, I don't have a full complement of frost giant magic but I've already used it more than ten times."

"What for?"

"Chilling drinks, cooling people down when it's hot out, drawing pretty pictures with frost..."

"Aw."

"I don't wish I was basically a frost giant instead of basically an elf but the magic's definitely more useful."

"Huh. Why not?" he wonders.

"Be...cause basically an elf is what I am? And I don't want to be--other than myself?"

"I mean - I don't know what it's like for there to be more than one species that's still basically the same kind of person."

"You're from a country, right?"

"Yeah?"

"If--something happened, and a bunch of people from your country and a bunch of people from a bunch of other countries ended up living together, but people still strongly identified as being from their original countries, and it were more convenient to be--a person from your father's country--would you wish you had grown up there instead?"

"...Depends on the meaning of 'convenient'. If 'convenient' meant cool magic, I might."

"I don't really know how to explain it then. But--your species is something you just are, like an ethnicity or a gender or something. It's not a--fundamental difference in your personhood, but it still matters."

"I believe you, I just don't have an equivalent."

"Which makes it harder to explain."