Kithabel is sitting on the flat top of the tallest tower of her palace, forcing the rain to decline to fall on her, taking a break insofar as she ever takes a break. She has no constructive ends to pursue right now, so she's playing with the lightning in the clouds overhead. She doesn't want to try taking a direct lightning strike yet - she could probably take it, but only probably - but she can tell it to arc here and there in patterns, she can ball it up and watch it roll through the air, she can make it turn colors. She's making sure none of it hits the town, and if it starts a fire in the woods she'll take care of it, but at the moment it's a toy.
A metallic plot device in his hands whirrs and beeps, then explodes twice.
And she's staying dry; that's no mean trick. Being soaked by the rain can't be good for image, so Skeeve creates an illusion disguising himself as himself. This does precisely nothing to change the actual degree of wetness, but appearances are everything.
I had territory for a while, eventually people started seeking me out for solutions, now I'm a magician for hire. Don't worry; I'm not going to fight over your town."
"Okay, I haven't memorized world geography in any detail, but if you have enough momentum to speak fluent Reesh while not having heard of Tanree before I should have heard of you even if you were a hermit sorcerer from Aundacel. Can you point to either of those places on a globe? I have a globe."
"It's pretty simple; you stare at it for hours meditating about how you're a magician who can rewrite the rules of the universe with your mind and it's an inanimate object and it has to obey you. After that doesn't work, you do it again. When I eventually got it, it was after hours of not even noticing time had passed, with months of failures beforehand."
"Here it's momentum. You gather momentum and you can do more and bigger things; you can channel that into a specialty, like healing or architecture, or you can go for sorcery. The official cutoff point around here for whether you're a sorcerer or not is flight, although if you don't do anything but fly you lose your general momentum and turn into a flight specialist. So you could fool someone into thinking you're a sorcerer but then they'll think you can do anything you want."
"Ah. Magicians can do effectively anything, but few individual ones can do everything. The things people hire magicians for aren't necessarily directly using magic; it's more problems like turning an army around, or dethroning an aristocracy of vampire cows, or convincing two politicians to hold a halfway fair election. As I said, impossible."
"The phenomenal cosmic power comes in useful, but mostly it's because a magician is a professional problem-solver. And non-magical people, most of the time, have non-magical problems. Do your people only ask for help when it's a magic-related problem?"
"Flying requires a fair amount of momentum, and you can't get there gradually because if you fail at it during an intermediate step you plummet to the ground and possibly die, so it's considered the cutoff for who's a sorcerer proper versus who just does more magic than most people. I think in some places they use the ability to breathe water as their cutoff."
"If you have to keep up doing a variety of things, then I see why there aren't more sorceresses. Between the low number of people interested in magic in the first place, the number who'd give up sleeping for it, and the number who prefer sticking to a few things they're good at, I'm almost surprised there are any."
Chocolate could make the difference, but it's not literally magic."
"I mean, you seem to handle political problems that sorcerers mostly avoid. I'll be called in if there's a flood or a fire or blight, I'll stop an earthquake if one troubles the area, that sort of thing, if there were an army attacking I'd probably protect civilians rather than engage in combat. Sorcerers fighting can't end well, and we'd be staking our momentum on our ability to make it out conscious."
"Also, if everyone agrees about something their smaller-scale magic cooperates. If I wanted to, I don't know, pull a moon out of the sky, I'd be working against everybody in the world who likes the moons where they are. I don't know how many centuries of unbroken momentum that would take, but it would be huge."
"It depends on a few factors. Also, I'm not sure how you'd average sorcerers. I could make this rain hit carefully selected locations, or make all the raindrops hit the ground to a beat, but it's been long enough since there was rain that I think the local farmers could give me a hard time making it stop entirely. If I were forty, I could probably do it around a small town like this, but not a city; if I were a hundred I bet I could stop any rain that no weather specialist or sorcerer were opposing me about."
"Even so. If some sorcerer hides out near a city they don't like for a while, they could stop the rain until someone restarts it, then maybe turn the soil to something more useless, and so on until they run out of ideas. If it's not obvious who did what, then the system is relying on all the powerful sorcerers being sane."
"My momentum is gone. It's all gone! I should be able to make light even if I spent a week on fucking vacation! You life-destroying bastard what did you do to me? It's all gone, years of work, I just fucking learned to fly and it's gone what the fuck did I ever do to you it's gone it's gone it's gone!"
Someone knocks on the outside of the door, and a voice says "All right, who's in here and what's going on. Some of us are trying to sleep, and the walls here aren't as soundproofed as they ought to be."
"You didn't tell me it might zap me to locales unknown!" hisses Kithabel. "Or activate without any prompting as opposed to merely incorrectly! And now who knows where we are and I don't have any magic not a speck!" She is a little too pissed off to pay attention to the knocking.
"The idiot—alleged idiot—didn't know it was going to do that, any more than he knew dimension-hopping could take her powers!" Skeeve yells back. Whether any of this makes sense to the newcomer is not his priority right now. "It never did that to any magician I've ever heard of before!"
I'd rather poke this thing until it works again, and get this fiasco over with."
Skeeve is surreptitiously dripping with rainwater from Kithabel's world. It's an unusual activity for someone who looks completely dry.
"I thought you were keeping the rain off you, anyway," she says, peering at the puddle. "I'll calm down soon enough and I do actually believe you that you didn't put two and two together about leaving wrecking my momentum. I'm good at self-teaching, anyway, if you start with a basic explanation I shouldn't trouble you very much about it. I'll be just as willing to skip it if you can get me home, but it doesn't seem like that thing works usably."
There is no way way you haven't noticed this if you've posed as magicians before."
"I'm the only one here who knows how to build one, but I'm working on fixing that. It produces a type of energy that's useful for things like this." He touches something on the wall, and the room is lit. "Anyone who can power a generator can make it real obvious whether or not they're creating more energy than they're putting in."
There's no ritual you need to do first or anything, if that's what you mean."
"Long enough" was, apparently, longer than it seemed like. The sun is starting to rise, for one thing. Hank and Skeeve are in a corner of the room poking at the misbehaving device. Skeeve announces "you did it!" and rushes candleward.
"Some of my coworkers can dimension-hop on their own, and at least one of the others can handle this more reliably than I can. If I'm using this it's usually because I'm traveling alone and there isn't a permanent gate between the relevant dimensions. Or because I wouldn't mind being dropped in a random world; that's always a possible reason."
"I don't actually know that that's something sorcery can do at all, but considering that any sorcerers who tried it would simply appear to have disappeared forever, maybe it is. Anyway, doesn't get me home. Is the accuracy of the device likely to improve any if we stay here for a while?"
An old man with a long beard walks triumphantly into the room, and then stops. "Thou'rt not he. Where is he who is called the Boss?" He fumbles in a pocket of his blue robe and draws out a handful of powder. "One of us two is prepared for this encounter!"
Hank answers, "I'm right here, Merlin. Can you stop with the whole nemesis thing already? You know you can't—" and then he imitates Skeeve. Merlin looks at Kithabel, reaches into a pocket again, and asks, "Side you with this false magician?"
But she'd like Merlin to get a faceful of that powder he sent the others to sleep with.
Since he seems perfectly willing to just wander off without harming her if nothing happens, and nothing is the default result if she can't do it, it's pretty safe.
Powder. Face. Go, dammit.
Of Hank and Skeeve, Hank is more likely to know what's going on, but Skeeve may be more likely to do something about it. Hmm. She sits near Hank and attempts to wake him up via a combination of shaking and attempts at magic.
Two guards arrive and prop up Merlin between them, keeping a firm grip.
I'll give him this, though, at least thinking people exist to be an audience for whoever can plausibly claim to have power is better than thinking they exist as part of the backdrop providing scenery for the people who were born into it."
The stairs lead down to a corridor; the palace is very pretty. Kithabel starts down it. "If you want to stay anyway I'll show you how to get off the waterfall and into town, but I'm going to be too busy getting my momentum back to play tour guide."
Besides, he knocked me out. I'm not too concerned with what happens to him."
Kithabel sighs. "Fine. ...Look, obviously I can't undertake much interdimensional travel myself without losing things it takes ludicrous amounts of time to get back, but if you're amenable I would not mind being visited for occasional swaps of otherworldly souvenirs for anything you might find useful locally. I won't be up to sorceress quality strength again for several years, but lower-grade momentum can still accomplish things and I'll be where I was again in another decade or so."