"Nine days local, stuck in a large stone building, unable to eat or drink or sleep, nothing to sit on, not much to do except communicate with the monument, and the monument is not enormously talkative. Then at the end you find out whether or not you passed the test. And I didn't detect anything in the monument that was set on keeping me there, but since I still don't know what sent me there in the first place, I'm not ruling out that there might be an entity with unknown goals and the ability to move people between worlds watching the taieli monument for unknown purposes."

"...You don't look like you recently spent nine days unable to eat or drink or sleep."

"The monument takes care of the physical requirements, but it doesn't take care of how boring it is to spend nine straight days awake in a large empty room with very few interesting features. I happened to be lucky enough to spend most of that time in some kind of weird monument-derived educational trance, but if it decides not to do that for you and you are anything like as easily bored as I am, you may regret going there."

"Oh, I get bored, but I think I could live with nine days upfront to extend the duration of my 'figuring out all the everything' project with some more everything."

"You're also not guaranteed to get the same analytical ability I did even if you get the magic - Senses are unique to the individual and you can't predict what you'll get in advance. I mean, if you still want to try it, I won't try to stop you, I'm just trying to ensure that you're accurately warned."

"I'm not going to run off and do it right now, but I'm strongly considering the possibility."

"Fair enough. Oh, and while you're there don't try to leave the building, there is no air out there and you might die."

"Noted."

"Anyway. How best to go about analyzing shapeshifting, I wonder?"

Kaylo takes a few steps back from the table and turns into a twenty-foot-long bejewelled-looking dragon.

"Huh," says Miles. "That was... that was something. It goes by so fast - can you do it again?"

"Sure." He does it back and forth and back again.

"You're definitely going somewhere," Miles concludes. "And coming back again in one piece. It's not, I don't know, creating you spontaneously from nothing every time. Just - swapping you out with the alternate model."

"Yes, that's the idea behind Lialenan theory."

"Well, Lialenan theory is on the right track then. I can't tell if conjured matter comes from the same place without an example, of course."

Kaylo reaches into his pocket, pulls out a little spout, twists it, and pours the resulting thin stream of water into his mouth.

"Pulled from somewhere, not created out of nothing," says Miles. "Huh. Does that mean your magic plain can't create things out of nothing, I wonder? Creating things out of nothing is one of the simplest elementary applications of taieli, the trouble comes when you want to create particular things with desired characteristics and not just undirected explosions."

Kaylo turns off the spout. "If conjuration doesn't do it, then probably not, although there might be a way to do it that we just haven't invented yet."

"Huh. Well, I guess it's only fair; taieli can't do interworld transport." He reflects on this statement for a second and then adds, "Yet."

"Yet as in you could graft this capability onto the system or as in you could learn how from within an already-available array of things doable therewith?"

"As in one of the other simplest elementary applications of taieli is copying and altering an existing thing, and spells definitely qualify as things for this purpose. I suspect if I put the work in, learning how interworld wizardry works and learning how to use rilte, I could make altered iltaiel copies of summoning or sending spells and use them to move between worlds."

"You almost certainly don't have a channeling capacity, which might interfere with anything beginning with a wizard spell as an ingredient," says Kaylo.

"I have an interworld transport spell on me right now," he points out.

"Yes, and it might decide to bite if you try to claim it for yourself," says Kaylo. "I'm not saying it will, I don't know what you're working with, but it's a risk factor I feel obliged to point out."

"...Bite me how?"