He totally speaks Leraal. Leraal is a language, and he speaks those. But he wouldn't see any profit in saying so, even if he wasn't—busy.

...hm. Ward? What's that supposed to mean, exactly? It doesn't seem to match the concepts he's familiar with. He listens some more, with what attention he can spare from the struggle.

"Hey box person," pipes up the younger girl, "no way you're getting out of the circle, but we'll send you home soon as we can show Nemaar what we want to show him."

Brilliance is deeply worried. Which means he has to spend another few seconds getting ahold of himself. But—fuck, do they even know what they've done? It really doesn't look like it.

"...Why?" asks the younger girl.

"I can't— I hate being trapped," he says, and he means it to be the beginning of an explanation, but instead what comes out next is "I can't stand it I can't stand it Ican'tstandit—" scaling up into a wordless wail.

Brilliance manages to stop screaming around when Korulen trails off midsentence. He doesn't say anything else immediately, because he is trying very very hard not to freak out in any destructive ways.

"Let me out, please let me out," he says desperately, "I'll go far away and I won't come back, just let me out—" He cuts himself off before he can start screaming again, but little gleams of panicked light skate along his edges, faster and faster.

"Please let me out," says an extremely agitated Brilliance.

"I can only do that if you aren't dangerous," says the woman. "May I check? I'll see nothing else."

"I'm a lot more dangerous in here than I would be a couple worlds away!" he says, just barely this side of terrified yelling.

"Don't - whatever you're doing - don't do that - don't mess with my mind," he says, calmer but still under significant strain, "I have seriously had enough of people messing with my mind - check whatever the hell you want to as long as it gets me out of here."

"I was being minimally invasive. I didn't look into what you'd call it. I can turn it off if you want to let me."

"...what, just like that? Seriously? How?"

"That's not hugely reassuring!" he says. "What are you gonna do with it? Do you even know what it is?"

"I can find out," says Keo. "I'm not going to touch it without your permission, but we can't let you out of the ward without rendering you non-dangerous, and it is making you very dangerous."

"...So tell me what you'd do to it," he says. "In more detail than just 'turn it off'. It's not just a function module, it's tapped into all my systems. A technician who didn't know what they were doing could seriously mess me up trying to take it out."

"I'm not a technician. I'm a unique jade dragon," says Keo, taking one of the room's chairs and sitting down. "I have your permission to examine it in more detail, then?"

"Yeah. Sure."

"Your accessory is an addition, not an integral feature. I don't think it will disrupt anything about you if I disconnect it, or remove its initiative, or delete it entirely," says Keo.

He experiences a slight spike of nervousness. "And you can just delete it entirely, and not take out anything extra by accident?"

"I have more than enough finesse. It's very clearly marked."

<They will be able to send you back in the future,> says Keo's voice.

<They summoned you at random in an ill-advised attempt to impress a classmate. It shouldn't have affected what magic you have, but depending on how your magic works, it might have made it less accessible - for example, wizardry, the kind they used to summon you, wouldn't work outside of this world.>

<I was pretty distressed at first,> he reminds her. <But yeah, a whole universe is plenty big enough for me. Especially now that I don't have to spend all my time trying not to blow any of it up.>

<The school is responsible for you regardless, so if you need anything, you can ask me. I'll notice if you think my name deliberately and firmly from any distance.>

<That's a weird kind of magical communication,> he says.

<I'm pretty weird. But it's convenient.>

<School of commonplace magic. Nobody else does what I do. There'd be little point in trying to teach it.>

<Your commonplace magic is still plenty weird to me,> he observes, peering around curiously and going up to a wall to touch it. He forgot the sensory immediacy of this form.

<It's called wizardry. Nearly anyone native to this world can learn it in one form or another.>

<Sounds like you only detect your kind of magic. I wouldn't expect any of the same thing to turn up in another world.>

<...We have got to be talking at cross-purposes here,> he says. <I've been to at least a couple dozen worlds and magic worked the same way in all of them. Is my magic really popular or is your world really weird or what?>

<Maybe you mean something more adjacent than entire worlds? Or your magic will only transport you to worlds with the same magic in the first place so it can continue to operate, as some kind of safety mechanism.>

<'More adjacent' sounds like it's on the right track. The coordinates I'm getting for this world are... kind of strange. It feels like, I don't know, like I've been jumping around between planets and now I'm in a whole different - why does this language not have a word for "galaxy"? Even "solar system" sounds wrong. Does this have to do with the thing where the whole universe is full of air?>

<Is your universe not full of air?> inquires Keo. <"Galaxy"... things don't cluster like that here.>

<All the universes I've been to are mostly full of vacuum. Which you only barely have a word for, apparently. Planets have air, some of 'em, and moons can too if they're big enough, but in between those there's nothing.>

<I'll understand you no matter what language you speak, by the way, dragons can do that.>

<So can Devices,> he says. <It's kind of handy.>

<Isn't it?> she agrees. <Figuring out what questions you want to ask by examining Leraal is reasonable, but if you want to switch I'll keep up.>

<The stairs are badly enchanted and will get you lost. If you can teleport they're not a terrible danger, but a lot of the students can't yet.>

<Sounds interesting,> he says. In he goes. <What happened, how'd they end up like that?>

<Poorly conceived intentional component of the spell by the enchanting wizard, and we haven't been able to break it, and we can't completely remove the stairs due to fire codes.>

<Huh. Wonder if I could do anything about 'em,> he says idly.

<You can experiment on the stairs as you like as long as you don't make them dangerous just to be in or affect the area beyond them.>

There's nobody else on the roof to hear him and no reply from Keo.

He flops down at the edge of the roof and peers over it at whatever might be going on down below.

There is a pond, with a couple of sparkly ducks (one black, one red) swimming in placid circles. Most of the visible terrain is grassland, though there are trees a bit farther off.

For lack of anything much better to do, he watches the ducks. They are sparkly.

Swim, swim, go the ducks. They dunk their heads to eat pond weed occasionally. The red one swims into a sort of duck-sized cave on the far end of the pond.

<...If you can eat roughly the same things as any of the species we have as students, yes, I can get you a cafeteria pass.>

<I can eat most things,> he says. <That was my dormant form you saw before; in my human form I have pretty much the usual set of human functions and systems, just - not so biological. More input leeway and cleaner energy conversion. Wait, what other species go to school here? Do you have magic talking ducks in this world or something?>

<We currently have enrolled humans, elves, halflings, leonines, vampires, and much smaller minorities of dragons, dwarves, and skyfolk.>

<...Well, I've heard of humans,> he says, giggling to himself. <Whatever. I can pretty much eat anything that's made of matter, as far as I know. I might have trouble if it was strongly corrosive or something. Where do I go to get a cafeteria pass?>

<I've keyed you to the system, you're all set. It doesn't have to be a physical pass.>

<Okay. So where's the cafeteria?>

<The lifts know the way. At the end of any hall you'll find a lift door; just tell it "cafeteria".>

"Hi," he says. Is she heading for the lift? He is also heading for the lift!

"...You don't recognize me, do you," he says, amused. "Last time we talked, I was about this big—" and he indicates with his hands the size of the Bicycle pack that his dormant form mimics.

Korulen jumps and sort of contracts towards herself. "Oh," she says in a small voice.

"She's my mom," confirms Korulen.

"I - was also going there. You don't know what food is like?"

He shrugs. "Never had any. I know I can eat, it's one of the things this form does, I've just never really had the opportunity to try it before."

"Huh. I don't have to feed both my forms but I do have to feed at least one."

"Oh, a deck of cards, that's what you were before?"

"Yep. I might change the details on that one; it was kind of plain."

"And you can change what it looks like. Wow."

"Yep. I guess you don't have anything like Devices in this world, huh?"

"I don't think so, no."

"It's a pretty weird world. I like it just fine so far, though."

"I'm going to be able to send you back whenever you want once I have a familiar," she tells him. "But I don't have to do it if you don't."

"If this was any other world, I'd say I could get back here just fine," he says. "I have interworld transport magic. But I tried to leave that way and it didn't work, and I don't know if it's because your world is weird or because your spell is interfering."

"If I have the option I'd rather be going places by myself instead of having to get other people to cast spells for me whenever I want to hop worlds," he says. "Huh, this thing is way less topologically screwy than the stairs."

"Did you go in the stairs? People aren't supposed to go in the stairs - I guess you can teleport."

"Yeah. I wandered around for a while, got bored, and teleported to the roof," he says. "You have sparkly ducks. Are all ducks sparkly in this world, or just those particular ones? They're pretty."

"It's just those ones. I think somebody decided to practice some color-change spell on them. There's practice objects and practice mice, but it gets boring."

"The ducks didn't seem too mad about it, not that I'd know how to tell."

"Um, you get a tray, and dishes and utensils, from over here," says Korulen, demonstrating, "and then you get yourself some of whatever you want," (she scoops herself a pile of a cornmeal mash), "and then you find a seat and you eat it and when everybody at the table is done you knock on it twice to clear the dishes away."

This results in extremely crowded plates; there's a lot of selection. Korulen raises an eyebrow and says, "You're allowed to go back for more things if you want."

"Oh - cool," says Korulen.

He giggles.

"What's your name, anyway?" Korulen asks, finally picking out which dessert she wants and finding an empty table.

"Korulen," says Korulen. She spoons up some of her cornmeal.

"...Food's a hit, huh?"

"Wow," is as much as he's willing to say given that he cannot speak and eat simultaneously.

Korulen laughs a little. She helpfully demonstrates the fork and the knife and the little tong things that are the non-spoon utensils, on those of her foods which suit each.

Brilliance pays enough attention to mostly not fuck up the use of any of them, although he does accidentally stab himself in the face with a fork. This causes him to start giggling.

Since he's not bleeding, Korulen doesn't refer him to the light.

As soon as he is no longer laughing too hard, he goes right back to experiencing foods. So many foods! And they are all so - so foods! He is seriously starting to wonder how people can bring themselves to ever do anything other than eat.

Korulen doesn't seem to have any trouble with stopping when her tray is clean, although she seems to find Brilliance eating to be entertaining enough that she doesn't leave right away.

"I don't actually know how you managed to eat that much," says Korulen. "You're bigger than me, but not by that much."

"Matter-energy conversion," he says cheerfully. "I turn it all into mana."

"Huh," says Korulen. "I guess that's pretty convenient."

"There's... not a formal limit on how much you can take and the school's sort of apologizing to you for what me and Saasnil did, but if you eat continuously whenever the cafeteria's open it'll be more than anybody is, um, expecting you to eat."

"I guess I can do other stuff sometimes. Maybe. Food is really amazing," he says.

"It's pretty good. They have different things, different days and times of day," she adds.

"Ooh."

Korulen giggles.

Brilliance beams.

Korulen knocks on the table and their empty trays disappear.

Several people notice the tray floating. One of them, a red-eyed boy who looks about sixteen, asks, "What spell is that?"

"The incantation in this language is 'Follow me', but I bet you can't cast it," he says. "Different kind of magic."

"...What kind?" asks the boy, interest sharpening.

"Doesn't have a name in Leraal - it's the only kind there is where I'm from, but you don't have it here."

"Where're you from?"

"...Also doesn't have a name, for that matter," he says. "A different world. Or maybe a group of worlds. I've been to a bunch of them and they all only have the one kind of magic, so I was kind of surprised when I got randomly summoned here and there turned out to be other ones."

"...Did somebody start a practical otherworld studies program and not tell me?"

"But you're still here. And out of your circle. And you have a cafeteria pass."

"Why would they not be able to - did they co-cast? Co-casting is idiotic for anything you're going to need to reverse."

Nomty nom - mm. Okay, he can take a break long enough to say, "I wouldn't know. I think that's what they did, though, yeah. Why, what's the difference?"

"Co-casting is when you split the power draw of a spell between two people to cut sting or fit a big spell in under their CCs, but it's only useful if you're not going to have to undo it."

"Guess they made a pretty dumb mistake, then. What's sting?"

"Casting spells more than half the size you can manage hurts."

"Weird way for magic to work," says Brilliance. "Mine doesn't do that."

"I would really like to hear more about your magic." The red-eyed boy sits down at Brilliance's table.

"Everything. I'm specializing in magic theory - in full generality, the fact that this is a wizard school aside."

Happy food-related chair-dancing concludes for now. "'Everything' doesn't give me much of a starting point," says Brilliance. "Like - I know there's nobody on this planet who can do my kind of magic, because if there was I'd be able to tell, and I'm almost positive there's nobody in the universe who can, because this place is so weird and full of weird magic and none of it's a kind I can sense. Although I kind of wonder if that's just a compatibility thing, like, maybe I could design a module that would let me sense - wizardry? And whatever else? But I'm not exactly an expert in that kind of thing, I was built as a combat Device."

Kaylo has a bag on his person; he pulls a notepad out of it and starts writing things down. "What is a Device?"

"Would this be easier to talk about in your native language?" asks the red-eyed boy, jotting down notes.

"I kind of don't have one," he says. "Why, can you speak them all too?"

"Yeah, I'm a dragon. Guys with funny-colored eyes and girls with funny-colored hair are more likely than not dragons. In what way do you not have one?"

"Is that a funny eye colour?" he inquires, peering into the relevant set of eyes. "It's rare on some planets, I guess. Anyway, Devices speak and understand all languages. There's a language I heard first but it's not really any more mine than any of the others and it's not my favourite. How about..." he thinks for a few seconds, then switches languages, "English, they spoke it in parts of the planet I was just on and it has a lot of the right technical vocabulary for some reason even though barely anybody there could do magic and most people didn't even know it was a thing."

"Funny colored for a human," says Kaylo. "English, fine. What makes somebody able to use your kind of magic - are all mages humans?"

"...Do you speak Draconic by any chance?" inquires the dragon.

"This is a sentence in Draconic," says the dragon, sounding skeptical. "It is useful for talking about things."

"...Whoa," says Brilliance, also in Draconic. "Yeah, that's a lot of vocabulary, all right. Why does it have words for this stuff? It's a dragon language, not a Device language. Is it magic? It's totally magic."

"It's very magic. Translation spells from around here bounce off Draconic like you never cast them but you seem to have it down."

"Is combat a primary purpose in making Devices or is that uncommon?"

"It's pretty common. Some of the most basic Device stuff, things that are common across all Device types, has combat applications - you remember I said, we protect our wielders from harm? The thing that does that is called a Barrier Jacket, and it's basically magical combat armor. Almost any Device can do it. I don't actually know of a way to do it without one. It'll protect from lots of things, not just straight magical damage, but it's definitely combat-oriented."

"But you currently appear to be way more geared towards eating ice cream than combat applications - people who make Devices don't get to pick personalities for them?"

"They do not even slightly get to pick our personalities," Brilliance confirms. "Also, ice cream is the best."

"Making powerful people with non-custom personalities sounds hazardous, how does that get handled?"

"...Really, really badly," he says, from experience.

"I'm asking primarily from a magic theory perspective, not an anthropological one."

"Yeah, well, my perspective here is the exact opposite of theoretical. I don't know of any good way to handle it, but I've been through plenty of bad ones."

Kaylo appears to have a brief internal debate, then says, "So, where do people get linker cores?"

"They're born with them. As far as I know, there's no other way to get one, but it's not a blatant magical fact like Device intelligence, there could be some way to get them from another source. Other things about linker cores... they're connected to mana colour; the core has a 'colour'" (the word he uses is the equivalent of colour for one of his magical senses, and is clearly linked to the visual version of the concept) "that translates to the visual colour you see when somebody uses visible mana. Devices don't have linker cores but we do have mana colours; mine looks like this," and he holds his hand out over the table and deploys a small magic circle on its surface. The circles and lines of the glowing diagram ripple through all the colours of the rainbow in a semi-random order at varying speeds.

"So you can use magic without a linker core because...? What does the linker core do in a human mage and how are you skipping it?"

"Innnnteresting. Are you staying around the school, if I come up with an analysis spell that'll let me have a look at your kind of magic can I point it at you and see what I can see?"

"Sure. I mean, I might go away, but I'll come back, they give me food."

"...So I should look for you in the cafeteria as opposed to a particular dormitory room, huh?"

"Yep. Dormitory rooms are for sleeping in, right? I don't sleep."

"Device thing or you thing?"

"Device thing. I guess it's possible there's some Device somewhere that sleeps, but I don't think it's common - it's the kind of thing you'd have to build in a function for on purpose, and why would you?"

"But eating is new and you have a function for that even though it's nonessential; why?"

"It comes with the form in a way that sleeping apparently doesn't, and it's not useless - I'm getting mana from all this."

"Interesting. What's the conversion rate like - what kind of quantities and units does mana come in?"

"It's not huge, but it's not nothing. And I might just be thinking it's not huge because I'm kind of huge. I'm getting about - this is an estimate, also why does this language have a unit system for mana, I love this language - fifteen to twenty thaums from a bite of ice cream. A little spell like the one I floated my tray with is about ten thaums to cast, with negligible upkeep. A high-damage personal combat spell is maybe five or six thousand thaums. My base power level is about fifteen orders of magnitude bigger than that. It's hard to get the numbers very precise because I'm sensing it all directly, not measuring it, and I can't 'eyeball'" (of course there is a Draconic word for that concept applied specifically to his mana sense, he loves this language) "the big stuff that well."

"That's amazing. How big are most Devices, most mages?"

"Most mages... between fifty or a hundred thousand thaums and a few million. I've sensed a few that I think might have gone up to a hundred million, but none any bigger than that. A hundred million is pretty powerful for a Device; most of the ones I've sensed were maybe one or two million. I've never sensed one that came remotely close to being as powerful as me. But I could probably hide my mana capacity from casual observation if I felt like it, so maybe all the other Devices this powerful do that automatically."

"Why're you so big? Does that make you smarter, what with the thing where the smaller ones are not even people?"

"Yep. And helpfully removed the control program that was trying to make me destroy planets. I do not wanna destroy planets, I like planets, some of them have people and I like people and some of them have ice cream and I think you can tell how I feel about ice cream."

"I can tell you feel pretty positively about ice cream," agrees Kaylo. "Okay good. How hard would it've been to make you?"

"Extremely. The people who did it were on the cutting edge, granted that it was about four hundred years ago so the cutting edge has probably moved."

"What kind of lifespan have you got there?"

"Indefinite. Devices just keep going until we're destroyed."

"I'm gathering you don't starve - what would do it?"

"Uh, if I took enough magical damage, or if somebody got into my systems and dismantled me, and I guess there's probably an amount of physical damage that would take me out but it'd be a lot. And I know some Devices have design flaws or unstable modules that mean they damage themselves when they cast spells close to their power limit, but lucky me, I'm good on that front. So basically there is nothing in this universe that can kill me, unless it's some of your weird magic."

"Describe 'magical damage'?"

"Blast enough mana at something and you can destroy it," he says. "Different combat spells are modulated differently, so some of them have almost no spillover and only hit magically defended things like Devices and mages wearing Barrier Jackets; by default, though, they'll hit undefended stuff a lot harder. A combat spell with enough raw power to flatten this school would knock me back a long way, but it wouldn't damage me much. Physical damage, like, I dunno, big rocks falling on me, accidentally stabbing myself with a fork - it'll damage my form but mostly superficially. It hurts some and it takes mana to repair, but getting crushed by rocks wouldn't be dangerous the way it would be if I took enough magical damage to make it look like I'd been crushed by rocks."

"Interesting. Is one of your forms default?"

"Not really. They all have different sets of functions," he says. "I like this one the most because it has the most - sensory depth? It also has direct access to high-power spells, which my other two forms don't. Staff form can cast them but needs a wielder to do it; dormant form can't do it at all. So I guess this one is sort of a default that way. But dormant form feels more defaulty."

"Why those three forms?"

"Dormant form's small and portable, staff form's wield-able, human form's autonomous."

"What's the point of having somebody wield you when you can run around like this and do all the things you can do?"

"From their perspective? Having a Device makes a lot of spells way, way cheaper, and lets them cast from the Device's power instead of their own, and it's just generally way more convenient, and also they have more control over exactly what things I'm running around doing. From mine? Who the fuck knows."

"Huh. Sounds like a good deal you wound up here."

"Yeah."

"You didn't have one of those wielders? More than one? Is it a one-to-one-thing?"

"It's a one-to-one thing for me, definitely. There might be some mages out there who use more than one Device, there might even be Devices out there who can have more than one wielder somehow, but I haven't seen any."

"I'm asking whether you had one because I'm curious if there's a magical connection that might persist across worlds, not because I felt like intruding on your personal life."

"I didn't have one when I got summoned, no. But it's definitely the kind of connection that would persist across worlds, at least in the group of them I'm used to."

"I'm curious about that grouping, too, how does that work?"

"Search me. Before I came here, I knew what a world was, and I could get to any of them I knew about with magic, or use a random transport spell to find a new one, and they all had the same kind of magic and worked the same way. Now I'm here and the dimensional coordinates are hell and gone from anywhere I've ever been and there's no magic I'm used to and a bunch of kinds I've never heard of and all the space between your planets is full of air."

"...What else would it be full of, cats?"

"In every other world I've been to, except for dimensional pockets where the rules are different, planets are wrapped in air and the space in between is just empty. Vacuum. Interdimensional space has little pockets of matter in between all the... interdimensional space, and those are mostly full of air wherever there isn't anything else, but they're also not usually very big."

"What is a dimensional pocket, and what's interdimensional space?"

"Interdimensional space is... between worlds? Or everywhere that's not a world? I don't know the theory at all, I've just been in and out of it some, enough to get a sense of how the coordinates work. Dimensional pockets are stable pockets of matter in interdimensional space. It's sort of all one thing but it's also sort of not all one thing at all."

"Huh. And how do the coordinates work, then?"

"Differently than coordinates for places inside worlds. Inside a world, you have the dimensional coordinates of the world and then the physical coordinates of your location in the world. In interdimensional space, it's - measured almost a completely different way; physical location coordinates only apply inside dimensional pockets, and the locations of dimensional pockets in interdimensional space don't work the same way as the locations of worlds, and in different parts of interdimensional space, coordinates for dimensional pockets work a different way than other parts."

"That sounds complicated. Any established way to map it?"

"Probably lots, but I never learned any. I have a built-in coordinate sense. I don't do it by numbers, I do it by feel."

"Fair enough. That a Device thing or a you thing?"

"A me thing, I guess. It's not a Device fundamental - it's built in, but it could've not been built in. So probably there's other Devices who don't have it."

"...Hi?" says Brilliance, uncertainly. That is a weird look she is giving him. He is confused and mildly alarmed.

"Huh?"

"Brilliance," says Brilliance, in vampire since that is the language that contains the word whose definition he's still unclear on and Leekath evidently speaks it. "I have a voice, I'm talking, last I checked nobody had to be delusional to hear me, do you mean listen to me a different way?"

"I mean Leekath is reacting to you like I react to tasty food," says Brilliance after he has had a small bite of ice cream. "Not like anybody else seems to react to tasty food. Delusional kind of listening isn't an answer, if somebody's looking at me like that and 'listening' I wanna know what they're hearing, whether or not it's their own brain making it up."

"Dragons are really really tasty," elaborates Kaylo. "If you're going to talk about vampiric inanimate audition with her maybe I'll come find you later - you'll be around, right?"

"I repeat: they give me food," he says, grinning.

"You can be a box this big," she gestures, "with cards that aren't like local cards, in it, when you're dormant, but you could change the details of what it looks like..."

"Soooo you're not crazy," he says. "Why's Kaylo think you're crazy?"

"Everyone thinks I'm crazy. Me and all the other hearers."

"Aren't there things where you could just show them? I guess not everybody walks around with their alternate form specs hanging out, but still... it's just weird, that other guy was so insistent, he even got mad about it, but he's totally blatantly wrong. I mean, I guess there's a chance you were just spying on me earlier. I dunno, tell me something else."

"Well, I think a lot of us do go crazy," says Leekath frankly. "Your name is whatever word means 'brilliance' in the language you're speaking and you can do them all even Draconic as a native feature of being your kind of thing and you picked it yourself and you can also be a staff that's shaped like this -" She wavers a hand through the air in the correct curve.

"Yeah, you're totally reading my specs," he says. "That's weird. I wonder if that guy will write me off if I tell him he's wrong about the hearing thing. He was kinda fun to talk to about magic stuff. I guess this is magic stuff, I don't know what else it could be."

"It is. I don't know if Kaylo in particular is convinceable. I haven't tried very hard with him."

"Well," shrugs Brilliance, "guess I'll find out if it comes up. But okay, what's the draw of reading my specs? Is it just that I'm made of weird new magic, or what?"

"Yes. And you're also the only person I've ever been able to hear. It only works with things, usually."

"I'm a magical Device. Guess that counts. So how's it work? What languages does the me-voice speak? Does it just kind of ramble about me in no particular order or is it organized somehow?"

"All hhikiiias talk in vampire. It does exactly the rambling unless I ask questions."

"You can ask questions? Like what?"

"I'm not sure what to ask. I've never been listening to a person before. I don't know if I can - read your mind or what."

"It would," agrees Leekath. She tilts her head. "You're turning all the food into magical energy. That's interesting."

"Yep! Not a lot of magical energy, but whatever, it's not like that's why I'm doing it."

She nods.

A thought occurs to him. "If it's all in vampire, you're not getting much specialized vocabulary - can it tell you how much magical energy I check out at? What units does it use if it can?"

"Hmm?" Pause. "It's - well, the voice I hear is in vampire, but I get more information than is really in the words. I know how much but I don't have a number or units."

"Huh. Okay, what other scary stuff are you getting?"

"It's still coming in all linear, I don't know everything instantly. You were made by a group of people, eight of whom were involved magically - I don't know who else might have been helping them because they didn't leave the kind of imprint on you the hhikiiia is talking about now - you really like ice cream..."

"I do really like ice cream, that's definitely true. I really like most food, I've only started having it today, it's an experience."

"You don't need food, or air, or a specific temperature - I don't think I'm mostly going to be finding anything that's news to you unless you tell me what to ask."

"I don't think you're going to be finding anything that's news to me any which way. I can access my specs too. Anything I know to ask, I know the answer, pretty much."

She nods. "You used to have an attached part that tried to make you do things, and now that's gone because Keo deleted it so there's only the control codes left -"

Brilliance looks alarmed. "That part's news to me, what control codes?"

"...do you just want me to recite them? They won't work for me even if I do because I don't have the right kind of magic."

"I more want to know, like, about them - are they the kind of thing Keo can delete, can you tell?"

"...I don't know. They're not as complicated as the attached part, they might not count as a mind thing. It would be worth a try. I can ask if the hhikiiia knows how you could remove them by yourself though."

"That too. I'd rather remove them by myself if I can."

"Mm?" Leekath says, apparently to his hhikiiia. She's silent for a moment, then starts repeating what it says about the procedure to extract them. It's complicated and involves loophole exploits, but the hhikiiia reports on it in a very step by step fashion.

He listens intently as far as how to get into the right kind of maintenance mode - a kind he didn't know he had until now, this is supremely weird - and then says, "I got it from here, thanks," and runs through the rest much faster than instructions can be delivered; the individual steps from that point are as intuitive to him as the rest of his systems now that he knows where to find this one. No more control codes.

"They're gone," confirms Leekath.

"Thanks. That would not have been a nice surprise coming from somebody who could use 'em."

"I don't think there's anybody in Elcenia who can."

"I don't think so either. It's very comforting."

"It sounds lonely to me."

He shrugs. "I can, like, talk to people for the first time in four hundred years, and they're people I actually want to talk to, it sure isn't lonely by comparison."

"Why couldn't you talk to anyone before?"

"Would've taken attention away from trying not to blow up any planets."

"Because of the thing Keo deleted?"

"Yeah, that."

"It's a good thing you met her, then. There's only one of her."

"There's only one of most people. It's pretty great that she's the one of her that she is, though."

"I mean there's only one person with her kind of magic."

"...What, ever? Ever everywhere?"

"Right now. They're really rare, so rare that it usually works out to there being one at a time."

"I dunno," he says, "it's so totally unlikely that I was the one who got here in the first place out of all the people in all the worlds it could've been, I'm not sure it's that much more unlikely that I happened to meet Keo while I was at it. Seems like she'd be a pretty good person to call if you had a guy trapped in a summoning circle screaming his head off even if she wasn't the summoner's mom."

"I've never heard of her going on trips to foreign countries to deal with things at all like you there," Leekath remarks.

He shrugs. "And how often do you hear about things at all like me?"

"You're very unlikely," Leekath says. "What I mean is I don't think Keo's that easily reachable for people who don't go to school here or know her personally."

"I guess. Get anything interesting from my hhikiiia since last time I asked?"

"A list of things you ate. Now it's listing the hairs on your human shape."

"What, all of 'em? One by one? Wouldn't that take a while?"

"Hhikiiias don't really care about that. I can tell it to skip to something else if I think of what to ask."

He giggles. "I don't know why, but I'm imagining a disembodied voice listing all of my hairs and it's really adorable."

"It's not exactly disembodied. It's coming from you and it sounds like you."

"It sounds like me? Really? But - I dunno, it's still not me, it's not embodied in the sense of belonging to the mind that goes with the body, you know?"

"It sounds like you," repeats Leekath. "And - I don't know, hhikiiias never belong to minds generally speaking, but if I hear a voice talking about this chair and it's coming from the chair it's mostly like the chair is talking. You just have two voices."

"...But one of those voices is me as in my mind talking, and the other one is - a magic thing you can do that tells you stuff," he says. "If you ask what the incantation is for my built-in torture function, only one of us is going to answer. - And please don't ask that, and if you find it out anyway don't say it to me, even though you don't have a linker core and wouldn't have the privileges to use it if you did, just - don't."

"Um, okay," says Leekath. "I'm not used to people having hhikiiias, I don't know how to - be polite about describing it."

He shrugs. "And I'm still trying to figure out what a hhikiiia is like in the first place. I don't know what would be polite if you were talking to somebody else, but for me - the difference between my voice and a voice I can't hear or control that just says things about me is important."

Leekath nods. "Okay."

He smiles at her.

"You have five million six hundred and four thousand eight hundred ninety-six hairs, if you wanted to know."

He giggles. "And that's still weirdly adorable."

"Huh. Your clothes don't have their own hhikiiias, I didn't notice until yours started talking about them."

"Course not, they're part of me. I can change 'em the same way I could with my deck, see?" He inverts the black and white parts of the colour scheme with a shimmer of rainbow mana.

"Now they're talking about the colors they are now. That was a pretty - magic thing you did."

"My magic's pretty!" he says cheerfully. "Wanna see something else?"

"Yeah!"

He giggles, puts his hand on the table, deploys a magical diagram, and lifts his hand away from it. The centre of the diagram fountains tiny glowing spheres in a dazzling rainbow of colours; they rise into the air in a streaming column and then drift away like soap bubbles, slowly fading as they go.

"What's that spell for?" asks Leekath, watching the spheres float away. (The display attracts a little attention from some people nearby, too.)

"It's not really for anything, I just made it up on the spot."

"It's pretty. Is it easy to make up spells that do kind of complicated things like that on the spot?"

"It's easy enough for me. I don't know how easy it'd be for somebody who wasn't a Device."

"Are you planning to just stay in Elcenia forever?" asks Leekath.

"I dunno. I don't even know if I can come back when the spell that's holding me here breaks. I think I can, but it's hard to be sure."

"I don't see why you couldn't, if somebody else summoned you," says Leekath.

"I mean come back by myself. Using my dimensional transfer magic. So I don't have to keep getting somebody new to summon me every time the last one dies."

"Maybe a dragon would summon you. They live a long time, that's why they're so tasty."

"I'd still keep needing new dragons for as long as I wanted to stay."

"Hm?" Leekath tilts her head. "Oh, you're immortal." Pause. "You don't have normal blood... but you have some..."

"Mm? Why, you want some?"

"Not right now. I just ate. But I'm curious."

He shrugs. "You can if you want."

"I'll find you in a couple weeks. It sounds like - if you are biteable you'll be able to make lots of blood, so you wouldn't need a waiting list like the dragons have."

"Yeah. I can self-repair; as long as I'm not wasting huge amounts of mana on other stuff, I'm not gonna run out of blood."

"So I want to try it but I don't know if you'll want to tell absolutely everyone if it turns out you're biteable and also taste good."

"Sure, why not?"

"Well, everyone would want to bite you, then, and there aren't that many vampires just in this one school but there are plenty of us in the world."

He shrugs again. "So if there's more than I can deal with at once, I guess I get a waiting list."

Leekath nods.

"Anyway, why's living a long time make people tasty?"

"No one's sure exactly how the mechanism connecting the two things works, but the other reason it's good to bite long-lived people is that our lifespans are an average of those of who we bite."

"...huh. So what, everybody who bit me would just be immortal? Maybe I'll get a vampire to summon me. I'd still rather use my own magic, though."

"Well, I don't know how it would work," says Leekath. "Maybe you don't count for it at all. But how you taste will be a pretty good indicator."

"Guess we'll find out, then."

Leekath nods. "If you're curious to find out sooner than I'll want blood again you could ask my roommate or somebody."

"Sure. I don't know anybody, though, you'd probably have to introduce me."

"Do you want to come meet my roommate?"

He eyes his depleted tray, spoons up the last of the ice cream, and says (somewhat indistinctly), "Sure!"

Leekath leads him into the lift and directs it to her hall.

"Yeah, go for it."

She swings down from the perch and trots up to him and bites his neck.

"Huh," says Brilliance. It feels interesting.

"I think so too!" says Brilliance, giggling.

"...I'm not sure she's going to let go by herself until she's taken a gallon. Unless you let your blood pressure drop enough that she can't get it out anymore."

"Well, as long as she's not gonna make herself sick or something, I don't really mind either way."

"It won't hurt her exactly, but she'll probably be drowsy for a couple of days if you let her take an entire gallon."