The girl on the couch laughs. "Hi!" she says, poking her head up over the back of the furnishing. "Oh, wow, what bit you? This is an interdimensional bar! It has some really convenient properties like all of the books and also momentum-pausing which I'm guessing means nothing to you because if you lived in a world where that was a thing you would probably not have that particular configuration of scars."

"What about your world makes scars like mine unlikely? They're pretty unlikely in mine too..."

"You would've gone to a healing specialist or a sorcerer and gotten them fixed. Unless they didn't bother you at all and a sorcerer put them there to begin with and you didn't feel like calling in a better sorcerer, I guess."

"It's a fairy curse. Messing with fairy curses is a bad idea," he says. "And are you going to be as confused about fairy curses as I am about what you mean by momentum?"

"Yes, apparently." She smirks at some kind of private joke. "Tell me all about 'em."

"Fairies are a sort of person whom it is unwise to piss off," he says. "They can curse or bless people with various calamities or advantages. My father ran afoul of a fairy when he was young and stupid and earned himself a hereditary curse - he didn't know about the hereditary part until he had me, or he wouldn't have - my pain never fades, and if I'm stupid enough to have children, they'll be born with the same problem and a headstart of everything I've already accumulated. My mother got another fairy to bless me such that I can cope, but that one isn't hereditary and I wouldn't like my hypothetical kid's chances even if it were."

"That sounds inconvenient. And you don't want me to try fixing it?"

"Bad things happen to people who screw around with things fairies have done or given to people," he says. "Both in the sense that it tends to annoy fairies, and in the sense that fairy magic is just inherently a bad idea to mess with."

"Weird. Well, I'm glad you're coping."

"So, do tell me all about momentum, I might as well hear the interesting interplanar stories while I am in the interesting interplanar bar."

"So, in my world, everybody can do magic. Little mostly useless magic, more if they're cooperating. The more magic you do, the more you can do. But the dropoff is really fast. Sleeping's a huge hit to most people's momentum, you can cut it down by doing naps instead of a full eight hours but it still slows you way down. A day off is out of the question. But!" She gestures expansively at Milliways. "This place! Pauses momentum! I can't gain any here but I also can't lose it, I checked, I waited a few hours not doing anything and I can still," she turns invisible, "do this."

"It takes years to build up that much. Years of doing stuff, and it's easy to run out of stuff to do, if I'd been born someplace that had a sorcerer already I would've had to move or go nomadic as soon as I could fly because they'd be keeping all the work to themselves."

"...In what way is it easy to run out of stuff to do?"

"It can't be repetitive. You can do specialist momentum instead of sorcerer momentum, if you want, and just be a healer or an architect or something, and then you can take a whole weekend off if you want, but for sorcery you need variety. And it's harder to do things that people wouldn't want you to do, because they all have their own bit of momentum even if it isn't very much. And you need bigger and bigger projects. It is pretty easy to do all of the things in your momentum class that there are to do in a town in a week or three and then you have to go somewhere else, because you can't just wait for more stuff to crop up."

"And you can't just... okay maybe I shouldn't be getting into this," he says. "I know I'd probably be kind of annoyed with somebody coming in from another plane and asking me why I don't just."

"No, go ahead, ask me if I can't just. For all I know you have a refreshing new perspective and it will turn out that I can just."

"Well, since you asked. With my current understanding of the system and its restrictions, what I'd do is find somewhere to settle down where anyone living nearby knew to come to me with their actual problems, and then I'd - I don't know what you actually do with your magic - turn invisible and back again and construct and dismantle variously complicated magical dwellings and juggle fireballs and freeze and unfreeze small decorative ponds and grow a garden and create beautiful sculptures and destroy them in interesting ways and you can delete whichever of these specific suggestions are nonapplicable but the point is that unless there's a detrimental effect from undoing your own work, or something else I'm not thinking of, I cannot conceive of how it is possible to just run out of things to do. Run out of things to do that would be fully worthwhile on their own merits even if I didn't have to do them to keep my streak going, maybe, but that's a very different thing. So what am I missing?"

"Well, I do do things like that sometimes - frequently, even - as space filler. But it's legitimately difficult to keep up the variety that way alone - maybe it's that you're thinking of too many things as being different things?"

"Which things are different things, then?"

"The things you mentioned mostly are. Although turning visible again doesn't add anything - even maintaining invisibility pretty much doesn't except that you can't lose a power you are actively using by loss of generalist momentum, you'd just have specialist invisibility momentum left if you did that. But they aren't big enough. It's better than sleeping but it won't get you to sorcerer level - defined depending on locality as either flight or water breathing by generalist momentum alone. You need big stuff at sorcerer level - landscape-altering things at least every now and then."

"...I'm a little afraid that if I try any harder to figure this out I'm going to encourage some very bad mental habits in myself," he says. "But it's an interesting problem and I definitely think there's some kind of perspective issue at work here even if I can't quite tell what it is."

"Bad mental habits?"

"In my world - it sounds very much like yours doesn't have this problem, for which I congratulate you - hubris is a lethal character flaw, and I do mean that literally. I'm pretty sure that before I turn thirty I will have either died of it or ascended to the category of people whom everyone else has to worry about being hubristic near."

"Oh dear. Hubris is a necessary job skill for me. Doing magic requires an attitude of entitlement. Please do not swat people for being hubristic once you are big and scary."

"It would be a bad idea for me to start talking about the things I plan to do when I am big and scary, but swatting people for hubris definitely doesn't feature."

"That's reassuring."

"So in what way does doing magic require an attitude of entitlement...?"

"That's the procedure. Your momentum against whatever the world would be doing if you weren't there. It's actually sort of creepy when you're doing magic to people, but you have to get over it being creepy if you want to heal them or anything. Should I go into more detail or is this dangerous for you to hear?"

"...it's dangerous for me to hear but also undeniably tempting," he says.

"Well, let me know if you come to a decision on that, because for once in my life I do not have to be impatient. I'm Kithabel, what's your name?"

"Milan. Nice to meet you. Your world sounds terrifying but it's terrifying in a much more appealing way than mine."

"I think it's really nice in my world!" Kithabel protests.

"I'm sure," he says. "But much less nice for a manic-depressive with a lot of suppressed ambition and an ingrained flinch reaction to hubristic thoughts, you must admit."

"Well, you probably would have an awkward time being a sorcerer, that I admit, but you'd still benefit from there being lots of us around and we wouldn't smite you!"

"I refer you to the lot of suppressed ambition."

"So you'd probably try and not get much of anywhere, because it takes years to get much of anywhere and your depressive periods wouldn't mesh well, but still."

"...This conversation is so bad for my mental habits. I'm not totally sure I'm not fatally contaminated already."

"...Um, I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault, you didn't grow up in my world and you don't know me," he says. "But it's so very tempting to try to cross to your plane, let loose, and prove you wrong about what a bad sorcerer I'd be. Except that if I did that I could never go home again or I'd definitely die. Unless I got to epic scale first and your world's momentum translated unproblematically to mine, and I am not at all confident that it would, and there's no testing it except in the doing, which, again, runs a high risk of certain death."

"Well, you could see if a little momentum would stay with you if you went home with it. Although I'm not sure if I can hold the door for you without needing to be doing stuff myself."

"...That's... also the sort of thing that runs a moderate risk of death, especially considering what I'd be planning on using the knowledge for. My world does not take kindly to experimentation and it really doesn't take kindly to overreaching."

"In my world, if you think you have figured out a clever trick by which you can get ahead of everyone else, you're almost certainly wrong and depending on what you're meddling with it may literally explode in your face," he says. "Trying to figure out how the world works, in a new area or at a significantly increased level of detail relative to what's already common knowledge, is the sort of thing best done very humbly and cautiously and keeping in mind that the world might at any moment, usually the most inconvenient one possible, abruptly decide to start working in a slightly but crucially different way."

"Huh. Trying to figure out how the world works doesn't work very well in my world, because people usually have opinions about how they'd like it to work and then their experiment will juke funny by magic, but nothing like what you're saying."

"No, in my world the opinions you need to worry about are those of the universe itself and any dragons, fae, or miscellaneous hazardously epic individuals who may be nearby."

"And they have persistently antisocial opinions, huh?"

"The universe is... I could charitably say 'shy'. Dragons and fae pursue their own interests, which isn't necessarily bad in all cases, but there's no good way to certify that only nice friendly hazardous people are nearby when you're trying something."

"Wow, your world sounds terrible. Are you sure you don't want to just escape to mine? Leaving aside the part where yours might kill you as soon as you go back."

"I have a family. I'm not going to abandon them without some reason to think I might be able to go back. But it sounds like getting epic is just a matter of practice in your world—please tell me right now if there is an even theoretical limit to achievable momentum—"

"Not that I know of."

"—So it's at least plausible that if I got to your world and hit my stride I might one day be able to tell the world itself to fuck off. And if I go back home with nothing, having experienced this tantalizing opportunity, I do think my odds will have shifted in favour of death. It's hard to predict by how much. The more time I spend pondering the question at all, the likelier it is that I won't be able to go back to my nice quiet life as a skirmish player and will instead do something prematurely hubristic and get myself killed."

"A what player?"

"Skirmish. It's a game. Opposing teams of people try to fake kill each other with fake weapons that do exclusively fake damage. You'd think this would be a stupid hobby for somebody with my fairy curse, but I'm really good at it and the way my blessing works means that accumulating more pain is a worthwhile tradeoff."

"It is?"

"I don't want to turn it up just for a demonstration, but I always have the mental capacity to handle the amount of pain I'm in and I can choose approximately where to set this balance at any given moment. So I'm not currently feeling the full effects of all my skirmish battles and am also not currently thinking four or five times as fast as a normal human. If I keep playing skirmish, eventually it'll be six, seven..."

"Oh wow, that'd serve you in good if extremely uncomfortable stead sorcery-wise, unless it means you need to sleep more often."

"Not a bit. My sleep cycle is totally unrelated to my pain balance, except that when I'm running high it's obviously hard to sleep for multiple reasons and when I'm tired out it's harder to run high."

"So you could build up a few days' worth of normal person momentum all in one day and then only lose one night of sleep to it. You could probably catch up to me, especially if you went biphasic."

"Biphasic...?"

"Sleeping in two shorter chunks instead of eight hours all at once. Some people manage shorter naps; I couldn't get that to work for me but I can do two."

"I mean, your depressive phases will be a major setback and I don't know how it'll balance against the speedup thing," snorts Kithabel. "But I'll take you home with me, sure. After I've had a good long lie-in. I'm pretty well suited to never taking a break longer than twenty minutes but that doesn't mean I'm not taking advantage as long as my momentum can't drop."

"Can you find time in your busy lie-in schedule to tell me everything that might be even potentially relevant about your world? And would it be workable for me to hang around while I'm getting up to speed and give you suggestions about how to fill your time without annoying your neighbours?"

"Oh, yeah, I have lots of room in my castle and I don't mind helping you out. Although the translation effect in here won't follow us so I'll have to get a friend to make me a translation object for you; I'm not ramped up enough to do that yet. Where do you want to start on Kithabel's World Facts?"

"How about an introduction to the usual trajectory of a nascent sorcerer?"

"You drop out of all your other commitments, announce it to everybody you know and make them tell all their friends, develop a taste for coffee, and then tromp around doing people's gardening and pest control and housepainting and catering and minor healing not worth walking to the healer's for, until you can do something interesting."

"Was that what you did? What are the time scales involved like?"

"Oh, I left school when I was little and just read books while I was going around to do things in various places. I always wanted to be a sorceress. I'm seventeen now and very young for a flier."

"Hmm. I'm trying to form a general sense of what things become doable before or after what other things..."

"The big milestones are comprehensive healing of arbitrary nonfatal conditions, flight, teleportation, resurrection of the dead, and being able to go without sleep, in that order."

"Hmm. How about the little stuff that comes before comprehensive healing?"

"Average person - who has more than zero momentum, I mean, zero is usually very small children and it's hard to systematically know what-all they can do - can nudge small objects without touching them, rescue a burned batch of cookies, dust a room one surface at a time, make enough light to see by at night for a short distance, get a butterfly to land on them, that sort of thing."

"That seems like plenty to be going on with... okay, what about specialists, what should I know about specialists?"

"Specialists are what happens if you practice a specific genre of thing. You can sort of wear a groove into your momentum. It doesn't fade for that thing as fast. So you get healers, I followed healers around a little doing what I could but I needed to go do other stuff after an hour or three every day, who can work most days but sleep in or skip a day or two if they want, and they'll still be about normal levels when they come back in. They're not as fast as a high momentum sorcerer but they're comparable to a low- or mid-level flier like me in their specialty."

"Hmm. So why exactly is hubris a job skill, anyway?"

"It's how you actually do the magic. Things that are well below your level, or really trivial even if you're also very low-level, you can mostly do it just by concentrating, but to do anything closer to your limits you cultivate a sort of indignation that the universe had the nerve to be in a way that does not meet your approval. And then the universe will rearrange itself in search of your approval, because mine is better than yours."

"It is!"

"Oh, come on, you're going to flee to my universe because yours is a murderer."

"Please just stop," he says firmly.

"Okay, fine."

"Thank you."

"Any other questions?"

"Oh, lots, I just haven't adjusted to the new mindset yet so they're not coming to me in a convenient order."

"Okay. Well, while you're thinking of them, Bar over there is sapient, friendly, and will give you a free drink."

"...How very... friendly of her...?"

"It is!"

"I'm going to go around being unnecessarily suspicious of a lot of things, I think."

"Because... you worry they will squish you?"

"Not exactly. It's just that at home, many of the possible explanations for a friendly magic bar that gives away free drinks are... unpromising. I'm not even thinking of specific examples when I say that, it's just a feeling I have."

"Well, skip it if you want, I don't think she'll be too offended. I can make beverages too if that's more comfortable. Although I took one from Bar because she could come up with things I'd never heard of to make."

He shrugs. "I have time to think it over, I guess."

"Yeah, I'm probably going to be lazing around in here for days. Longer if I accidentally let my sleep schedule slip, so I can get it back on track."

"I definitely think I'm going to need a better tutorial on how to go about sorcering before I try to actually enter your world, but I'm not sure what to ask for exactly."

"I could... do something little and walk you through what I'm thinking?"

"Sure, that sounds useful."

"Any preferences?"

"Not off the top of my head, because one of the things I'm still missing is a functional intuition for which things you can do exactly. I don't have anything that needs healing and I'm actually a little worried that being healed with sufficient comprehensiveness would zero out my accumulated pain totals and then where would I be... I think you said you can conjure food and drink...?"

"Yes. It's not minor; should I just conjure something or conjure something that's imperfect in some way and then fix it?"

"Sure, conjure an imperfect thing, why not."

"Well, if you're good at it, it gets less like this, I'm told, but sort of a - hang on, you don't want to be healed so I'm not gonna look directly at you while I monologue about it," she turns around. "This is my person, it is wrong that my person should have suffered damage, it must stop at once, how dare harm intrude on the borders of what is mine like that person over there I demand that it stop."

"...Huh. That's not how I'd go about it if I were hubristically demanding that the universe conform to my expectations as regards people being harmed," he says. "I wonder if the difference is significant or if my way would work just as well."

"What's your way?" she asks, turning to look at him again.

"I - hm - it's a little difficult to articulate, but it goes something like: this is a problem, and it's been brought to my attention so it's now my problem, and it will now proceed to be fixed because I will accept no less," he says. "Thinking of the person as 'mine' would involve a - level of commitment that I'm not sure is appropriate to the task. I could heal someone who was my friend or my teammate your way, but for a more 'that person over there' sort of situation I'm better off relying on the bottomless depths of my hubristic and meddlesome nature if I possibly can. Thinking of a person as mine is a long-term assumption of responsibility, the way my mind works; thinking of a problem as mine just requires noticing it and giving in to my instinctive response."

"Well, I guess that might work, although it's not how it's usually taught. I find it pretty easy to take temporary mental ownership of a person but if you have trouble putting them down again it'd be worth seeing if your thing works."

"My outlook's a bit feudal, comes of where I grew up. I guess we'll see if I can succeed with the alternate method."

"If it works I might try it, although I'm almost to the point where I don't have to go stepwise at all."

"Happy to help." Pause. "Because I am hubristic and meddlesome."

She giggles.

He grins.

"If you do approach my level we're going to have to talk territory. Unless you're happy enough just playing with pointless things in a corner somewhere."

"My end goal is still overthrowing the gods; if I have to spend a while playing with pointless things in a corner somewhere first, so be it. But I'd really rather cooperate, and if cooperating is as intractable as all that, I'll take a neighbouring territory if one is on offer."

"It's not completely intractable. Cooperating sorceren can do bigger projects as long as they can agree on what they're aiming at in sufficient detail. It'd just mean we'd have to find bigger projects to do."

"I'm sure we can come up with those."

"Quite likely. And I just recently gave the local rulers of things beads to talk to me from a distance so they can call me up for anything me-sized; if you get significant momentum I can notify them that me-sized has taken a jump."

"Well. We'll see how well my fairy blessing helps me along."

"Yep."

"I wonder if the bar, being from neither your world nor mine, might have a valuable perspective on translating between the two."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, it seems like you're having a little trouble explaining your world to me in enough detail, perhaps because you don't know which information I'm missing, and I know I'm having trouble asking the right questions because I don't know what they are. That's the sort of problem I imagine someone who hangs around this sort of place a lot would have a lot of experience dealing with."

"We can talk to her, I guess, but she won't know what you want to know in particular."

"I want to know whatever I'll be better off knowing as someone who's going to move from my world to yours and then live there. You might know all that information but it would be hard for us to compare notes thoroughly enough to figure out that you do have toast and healers and you don't have skirmish or fae and so on for all potentially relevant phenomena - I can stand here going 'dwarves? a-mail? universities? paladins? lawyers? cats? trees?' all day, and you can do the same to cover the things you have that I might never have heard of, but it would be kind of a haphazard way to go about it. If the bar knows the relevant things already, she'll have a much easier time getting me up to speed."

"Oh, fair enough. Well, she's over there." Gesture.

"Well, that would've been good to know much earlier," he says of the second napkin. "But then I suppose you must already know what I've come to ask. Can you help me?"

"Curious. No equivalent of thaumatology? I guess with only one source of magic, and a fairly simple and predictable one at that, there wouldn't be much call for intensive study..."

And those who practice it are disinclined to hold still for rigorous repeated experimentation.

The planet has four moons and a set of lovely rings, Bar continues. The population density is rather high but not, mostly, urbanized, as most of the reasons to centralize don't apply. Kithabel's home is the Sunlit Satrapy, but except for governing parties forwarding information about tasks to do to sorcerers they are unlikely to intrude upon your life very much.

"Thank you," he says. "As for the drink, do you offer recommendations? It seems to me that you're also in a very good position to give people things they'd never think to ask for on their own."

I do and am.

"Then I'd like whatever you recommend, please."

"Thank you. My faith in your recommendations is entirely vindicated."

Why thank you.

"What'd you get?"

"Surrounded by eavesdroppers, apparently," he says, glancing over at the couch. "I have no idea what this is but it's delicious."

"You're not that far away!"

It is called a "butter mug" or a "hot morning" depending on locality.

"The bar says it's called a hot morning. And I am still out of what I'd consider conversational range with anyone who has no significant elven ancestry."

"Elven?"

"Apparently you don't have nonhuman people in your world; well, we do in mine, and elves in particular have, among other attributes, very sharp hearing and the ability to project their voices to specific people across a distance."

"Oh. I do maintain all my senses a little sharp - not enough to feel creepy about it, by default, but I didn't have any trouble hearing you from here."

"My own mother's a quarter-elf, it's not creepy exactly, I just don't expect it of people by default."

"I wonder if most people at home will have better senses than you're used to from humans? I don't know what the baseline even is, but nobody wants things to be blurry..."

"That sounds like the sort of question that might profitably be asked of the knowledgeable interplanar bar," says Milan.

Unfortunately, my own senses are uncorrelated with either and it's difficult to figure this sort of thing out from the published works of each world in which no similar scale of vision measurement is applied across the board.

"The bar isn't sure. Well, thank you anyway," he says.

You're welcome.

He continues to drink his delicious drink.

Kithabel lounges. She accepts food recommendations from Bar and pays her with 'Satrapy sorcery credit', which she explains as deriving from the principle that sorceren are a valuable public good and should not be inconvenienced or delayed in attempting to acquire goods worth less than a certain medium-sized amount. She gets a room and naps and comes back and reads.

Milan asks the bar for recommendations of informative or entertaining books from Kithabel's world and then sits down to inhale them.

Her world has a lot of books! Bar is good at picking them. He gets novels and histories and what little tidbits about Kithabel's language Bar can manage in the translation aura of Milliways.

"Yeah. You said you could find a translation solution somewere, right?"

"I have a friend who's higher-momentum than me, she'll be able to do a translation object, she's offered me one for if I ever traveled outside my linguistic region. Might take her a day or two to swing by, so tell me now if you're allergic to anything, I guess."

"Happily no."

"Anything else that's likely to come up in the next day or two...?"

"Well, what's going to happen in the next day or two? I stay in your castle and attempt to creatively affect my environment; you go around sorcering and provide me with food and so forth?"

"Yep, that's about the deal."

"Have you already asked the knowledgeable interplanar bar for advice and recommendations regarding useful things she can sell us to take home?"

"And seen examples so I can make 'em myself instead of having to haul 'em all through the door, yes."

"Oh, excellent, what did you get?"

Kithabel consults her list, which includes things like "the internet" and "spaceships".

"Looks like you won't be in danger of running out of things to do anytime soon," Milan remarks.

"Oh yeah."

"I'm going to end up having aesthetic issues with the fact that sticking to a project for any length of time is counterproductive, but I can't quite bring myself to complain, at least not ahead of time. Let me just return this batch of books and then I think we're all set."

"You're returning them? Why?"

"Because I have finished reading them, except for the appendices of this lengthy work of fiction, and I don't feel like buying them to reread later."

"I'll show you around!" says Kithabel, taking off so as not to waste time just standing on the ground. The door shuts behind her and the rest of the tour is incomprehensible, if smilingly delivered.

Milan pays enough attention to actually pick up some vocabulary from this tour. He also manages to compliment her lovely castle several more times with tone and body language alone.

All of these changes take a while spent concentrating on them, but then they obey him.

It perks right up. It is so eager to please.

Kithabel comes home for a nap after a few hours of sorcering and checks on him.

He has gotten a trail of little lights to follow him wherever he goes and is working on adding little pebbles and streams of water to the entourage and getting the whole thing to do tricks. Also, her garden is even more radiantly healthy than she left it and her castle has been cosmetically spruced up in a number of places.

She laughs and then zooms away to crash. She is awoken later by a cacophonous scream of music, which she interrupts to look in on his progress again.

The lights and pebbles and water are orbiting him constantly while he goes around exhorting yet more health out of her plants and yet more beauty out of her palace walls, in between whatever other changes he may be inspired to accomplish.

Since she didn't stop for a conversation, he can't offer an explanation for the orbiting pebbles. Instead he keeps circling her castle. All the interesting cosmetic features he's added over the course of today are due for a freshening. His temperature preferences oscillate, warmer cooler warmer cooler. The floating lights and pebbles and spheres of water all fly around him in varyingly complex patterns depending how much attention he can spare to orchestrating them. Can he coax entire fruits out of her plants yet? Let's find out.

If he starts with a flower and can wait for the equivalent of ten subjective minutes for it, sure.

Kithabel wakes up again and swings by again. "How're you doing? Need something to eat besides fruit? I knew you had an expanded concentration thing but if you're doing all those individually that's still really something."

"I'm accelerating the expanded concentration," he explains cheerfully. And rapidly. "Yes please, still kinda hungry."

Kithabel hands him a bread bowl full of stew. "Enjoy. ...And by accelerating the expanded concentration do you mean you are self-injuring...?"

Kithabel pats one of his rocks as it passes, then zooms away again.

Milan resolves to nap the next time Kithabel does, because he should probably sleep eventually; in the meantime, he has flying objects to direct and fruits to create and assorted cosmetic alterations to overhaul yet again and cumulative small pains to add to his total and perhaps he should just be followed by quiet pleasant music wherever he goes, can he do that, let's find out.

That is somewhat beyond him unless he wants to personally conduct it note by note and settle for it being really quiet.

He can do that to start out with. It pushes the limits of his concentration but that's a good thing, if he's not pushing the limits of his concentration that is wasted concentration.

Kithabel comes back for another nap eventually. "Have you just been awake this entire time? If you crash for twelve hours that'll do more harm than staying up will gain you. ...Well, normally it would, you seem to cram more into an hour, but it'll still wind up being hell on your nerves."

"I've been awake this entire time, this is not the worst I've ever done to my sleep schedule, I'm probably going to try to match yours from now on but I wanted to get as much done as I could in the first rush. How'm I doing?" His lights and water and pebbles swirl through the air.

"I'm not sure how much of that is attentional capacity and how much is momentum but either way it's a very promising start."

"A lot of it is attentional capacity," he admits. "Anyway, naptime?"

"Sure. Take your pick of guest rooms, I'll make you an alarm of your own, what do you want it to sound like?"

She hands him a rock shaped like a turtle. "Pat it and tell it a number of hours and it'll yell at you until you solemnly swear to its satisfaction that you're awake," she tells him. And then she slips into her own room.

He puts down his pebbles, extinguishes his lights, disperses the water-spheres into little clouds of mist, tells the alarm rock to give him four hours, flops into bed, turns his blessing down to normal, and falls asleep almost instantly.

Four hours later the alarm rock is singing loud cheerful choir music.

Milan wakes up, appeases the alarm rock, reassembles his orbiting arcs of pebbles and lights, and goes to fetch more water to fill out the ranks and some fruit for breakfast and that floor could be smoother and the corners of these steps could be more rounded and...

Kithabel has left him breakfast in her dining room by the time he gets there. It is keeping itself warm.

Whether he collapses or not is up to him. Kithabel remembers to leave him lunch before she takes her next nap. (It seems like she has drastically reduced food needs.)

Since the goal was to match her sleep schedule, he requests another four hours from the alarm rock after he has his lunch. Then it's up again and around again, push push push, will this be the hour that he starts being able to make objects move around without constant personal attention? No? How about now? Also, he should have those drastically reduced food needs. And these plants should produce fruit on command faster.

Well, whether it's expanded attentional capacity or actual momentum improvement, things will happen a little faster today, but he will still be hungry for dinner by the time she makes him dinner and his objects will still fall to the ground if he ignores them.

Unacceptable. Clearly he needs to try harder. He can expand his attentional capacity faster if he puts his mind to it. It hurts a lot but he can always cope, that was the fairy's blessing. Fairy curses ought not be messed with but by the same token fairy blessings are very reliable.

The attentional capacity means he can do more things at once, and that does mean he acquires momentum faster, but you have to be approaching sorcerer level to do without food, and he is not there yet.

Automation is still beyond him. He's not cheating that hard. Conjuration is also not happening. Everything else: yes.

Absolutely.

Right then, off they go. Kithabel is, today, doing some healing - a specialist is taking some time off; they can do that - and then placing some magic equivalent of internet relays and conjuring up more to be brought farther afield by faster fliers, and then turning a farm's worth of corn weird colors (mostly for holiday decorations, but some of it will turn into interesting cornmeal) and then bringing in some rain and doing fun things with the lightning and then digging a tunnel through a mountain for a road.

Kithabel comes to check on him when she finds that his breakfast has not been eaten and loud turtle-originating music has made it through the entire Cantata and into the second act of the Afternoon Opera.

Milan is in bed, burrowed under blankets and pillows with only his eyes showing, sorcerously flinging pebbles against the walls of his room and then fixing both the walls and the pebbles.

"What was your first clue," mutters the blanketlump. A pebble shatters against the wall. Each individual shard picks itself up off the ground and turns a different colour and a different complementary pleasing smell and grows to a uniform size and perfectly spherical shape, and then they all fling themselves at the wall again.

"Thank you," says Kithabel smugly, and she goes and orders a 'surprise me' and flops by the fireplace.

Kithabel's credit may extend that far. You can sleep on the couch without paying for a room. You can earn a room by taking a job cleaning or at security or the infirmary. You can run up a tab.

"...I think I'll go for cleaning," he says. "I'm better than nothing as a healer but I don't think I'm up to interplanar-bar-infirmary levels. Thanks. And can I borrow a book? Something in the 'sad but funny and with a hopeful ending' category of fiction."

Bar provides, of course.

Kithabel is in a hammock in the backyard eating something called an "ice cream bar" and reading a book. "Oh look, you found your personality."

He giggles.

"You good to go? I'm starting to actually get tired of reading, which I had not imagined possible."

Kithabel laughs. "All right, let me know."

Kithabel has been introducing herself to "movies". But she has a bunch to bring home with her and doesn't mind interrupting her current viewing. "All set?"

"All set!"

They go home and resume sorcering.

He can set a record. (Kithabel approached the previous record but did not break it. She will try not to grumble.)

"Hello. And what're your life stories?"

"Complicated. You?"

"Also! You from an Earth or not an Earth, it's fifty-fifty so far."

"Not an Earth. I'm a sorceress, he's working on it, he moved to my world because his... was dangerous," she amends from something less polite.

"Sorcering is fun. I'm not from an Earth either. Can I ask, are you human? You don't quite look it."

"Nice catch. I am a vampire."

"Some otherworldly version thereof, I assume, it'd look different if you were the kind from home."

"I'll take your word for it. My kind look like our original selves plus sparkly complexions and red eyes."

"Odd, but not the oddest thing I've heard of around here."

"I'm missing some context on what vampires are?"

"In addition to the aforementioned we drink blood, we have rather unfair arsenals of superpowers, and some of us get magic on top of that."

"Ooh, unfair arsenals of superpowers," says Milan.

"Super speed - cognitive too - and eidetic memory and massively overkill physical strength and we can turn on a dime, all part of this complete breakfast."

"How charming. Are there any horrific disadvantages? Or even merely inconvenient ones? Also, what's the deal with the magic exactly?"

"Unquenchable thirst, we can't sleep -" She looks at their faces. "Or that's an advantage?"

"That's an advantage."

"An enormous advantage. Tell us more about this unquenchable thirst. How unquenchable is it?"

"Well, you get a few moments while drinking blood but it's basically there all the time. It's not half as bad as actually turning, though, that's nasty stuff."

"Define nasty."

"Three days, incomprehensible agony?"

"Well, that's all well and good for him, but I wonder if I can just skip it with magic."

"I'd be fascinated!"

"Three days of incomprehensible agony!" cackles Milan.

"Masochism or exotic otherworldly thing?"

"Exotic otherworldly thing."

"So, I'm enthusiastic about this. Kithabel, are you enthusiastic about this?"

"I'm not enthusiastic about the three days of incomprehensible agony, but, you know, can probably magic it away, and the rest of it's appealing. But in case there is some kind of unprecedented interaction with our momentum maybe we should not do it at the same time, you can go first since you're so thrilled with the prospect and it'll take you less time to rebuild from scratch if you have to, and I should spend like, four seconds, of your incomprehensible agony willing it away to make sure that's a thing that can be done, same with the thirst deal."

"Suits me."

"Is there anything else we'd want to know? For instance, why are you offering?"

"I'm a magic nerd. If I keep you around for three days - or call it six, I suppose - then I have all that time to interrogate you about what you've got back home, and then there's always the possibility you'll turn up with something new and exciting after. Dunno if it'll work on people from other worlds but back home sometimes people have magic, and it sometimes gets better after they turn, and sometimes they don't but they do afterwards. Idiosyncratic per-person powers. Called witchcraft."

"Oh, how charming," says Milan.

"What's the procedure?"

"I fill up on finest vintage from this kind lady," says the vampire, tapping Bar, "so that I'm in reliable control of my faculties, and then I bite you and the show's on the road."

"And control of one's faculties is a potential problem here?"

"Well, it varies. I can reliably pull the trick off, I've done it before, but sometimes vampires try to make more vampires and instead make corpses. Blood's tasty stuff."

"That sounds inconvenient, but inconvenience can be handled."

"How bad is this going to be if sorcery won't touch it...?"

"Can you get blood, wherever you're from?"

"Yeah..."

"Then you'll have a learning curve before you want to go downtown and inhale but you're all set to handle it and go about your business."

"But we should perhaps test how well sorcery can handle your unquenchable thirst, just to see."

"Yeah, may I?"

"Be my guest!"

Kithabel is her guest.

"Well, there's an image. Okay, so sorcery can solve this like so many other problems."

"I'm impressed. How do you get it?"

"You hang out in my world for years doing smaller versions of it constantly and in wide variety."

"I'm cheating outrageously and I still can't fly yet," Milan contributes.

"You'll get there soon."

"Anyway, you up for your three days of incomprehensible agony nowish?" Addy asks Milan.

"I might very well be. I'm probably having a reckless moment, but Kithabel is a much less reckless person than I am and she's interested too, so I'm not that worried."

"In that case, sure, I'll take my three days of incomprehensible agony."

"Hit me," Addy says to Bar, and then she gets a gallon of blood, which she chugs out of its glass container in four seconds flat. "Where you wanna be?"

"My room or his, I guess?"

"Make it mine, why not."

"Can I have your key so I can come and go to check on you while you're incomprehensibly agonized?"

"Sure."

So they all crowd into Milan's room. And Addy seizes him and gives him a chomp.

"Ow," says Milan. "Okay, that's fairly painful, but if the whole thing is like this you have vastly underrated my capacity to comprehend agony."

"It spreads out. And then concentrates, at the end."

"Won't that be fun."

"So it would seem."

He starts giggling again.

"Lemme know when it's all over everywhere so I can try giving you a break to see if that works."

"It's definitely going along, but it's not there yet. ...I'm tempted to run at capacity the whole time just to see how fast it goes up, but after three days running at capacity without any new sorcery to do and while probably immobilized by pain I'm going to be unspeakably bored, especially if the agony is as incomprehensible as advertised. Should've thought that through better."

"Well, I could read you books, but I don't read aloud particularly quickly."

"I can just run low the whole time. Then I might not be immobilized by pain, either!"

"And then you could read your own books."

"Much more convenient, if less gleefully hubristic."

"A bit, yes."

"And I do enjoy being gleefully hubristic. But not if it ends with me bored to death."

"I don't know if boredom can kill humans where you're from but it doesn't make a dent in vampires."

"It's made some attempts on me, but nothing serious."

"What is your exotic pain-related deal, anyway?"

"Fairy curse: my pain never fades. Fairy blessing: but no matter how much of it there is, there's always enough of me to deal. Not always comfortably deal, mind you, but I get along. And I can pick whether to run low and be a normal person with normal-person-manageable amounts of pain, or run high and have as much pain as I've actually picked up and a proportional increase in mental capacity."

"Oh, now that will interact funnily with the vampire deal, we have roomier brains."

"Fun!"

"That worked, you can stop now."

She stops. "All right, so I don't have to do the thing when it's my turn, good to know."

"Yes, congratulations, I will be over here enjoying my perfectly comprehensible agony."

Kithabel ruffles his hair and goes to get books while Addy resumes asking magic questions.

Milan has lots and lots of things to say about his world's magic. He never studied thaumatology directly, but he read a few books on it, and he lived in that world for seventeen years and heard of a lot of things. So many things.

"...I mean, be my guest, but you might die and also you'll have to get somebody else to open the door for you because if I do it I might die."

"Ah, I see. I'll just loiter around here and find somewhere else to go check out, I'm sure more interesting people will come through."

"Have fun."

"I will, thanks!"

Addy reciprocates with tidbits about her world, which has more kinds of people than Kithabel's but still many fewer than Milan's.

"That's by far the most positive review I've heard of the experience."

"I mean, it also feels really unpleasant, don't get me wrong, it's just, fairy blessing," he says. "And I've been running high consistently enough for long enough that I am used to this sort of thing. I might start complaining more vigorously once I'm farther past my previous ceiling."

"Well, complaints are more interesting than screaming about how Hell is real."

Snort. "Is it not, in your world?"

"I wouldn't know, I'm still alive."

Addy's having a wonderful time.

So is Milan!

That's weird, but no skin off her nose!

It certainly makes it a lot easier to engage him in detailed discussion of the various properties of his world!

Meanwhile, Kithabel catches up on her reading and peeks in on the conversation now and then.

"Okay, 'incomprehensible agony' was a fair description," Milan concedes, two days in. "It's not your fault I'm cheating."

"I wouldn't want you to think I was handing out false advertisements for my species."

Giggle.