T'Mir takes it. She otherwise keeps her hands to herself.

As soon as T'mir touches the kobold, they're in a cave. It's much dimmer, though not to dim to see, and the rock forms a series of shelves that are absolutely covered with an amazing variety of stuff - necklaces and vials and a cloak and a stack of books and a basket of spheres glowing softly in red and green and orange and another basket full of black sticks and a collection of small abstract glass sculptures with blobs of color moving inside and much more, in a chaotic jumble of aesthetic styles and with none of it labeled except for a few cases where the item itself has a name imprinted in plain English. There's also a pile of cardboard at one side of the clearing they've appeared in, with one propped-up piece showing T'mir's control room on the other side of a portal; the kobold goes to it and pinches the corner and the portal disappears.

"Wow, how long have you been accumulating stuff here?"

"A few years. My magic is pretty good for trading."

"Is it all useful or is some of it just collectable?"

"This is all magic; I've picked up a little art, too, but that's with my tribe."

"What does it all do?"

"Most of it is for mobility or stealth, one way or another - that's an invisibility cloak, those let you breathe underwater, that one muffles sound, the footcovers there make you jump higher, things like that. The way my magic works, I can't teleport somewhere specific unless I've been there, so being able to get more places is useful."

"That makes sense! Do you need to be able to visualize it or is it directly about having been to a place?"

"There's two ways I can do it; one's about having been there and the other one can work off of a description, sort of, but it gives a random place that fits the description if there's more than one, and there usually is. The second kind is how I found your ship; 'spaceship' isn't the kind of thing the magic can work with but 'an object too small to have its own atmosphere, but with enough of the right kind of air in it for me to be okay there' doesn't get very much else."

"I'm glad you found me and not someone who would have been upset about you appearing on their ship!"

"If you'd seemed upset I would have closed the portal instead of going through, but yeah. It's uncommon for people to have sharp enough hearing to catch me."

"I'm used to all the sounds of the ship. I'm less concerned about the scenario where you appeared on a bridge full of Cardassians, more about appearing in their cargo hold and wandering out..."

"Oh, I can aim well enough to get the portal near people to watch."

"I guess that's safe if you have good reaction time and they don't have some kind of automatic defense system."

She's amused. "That's not a problem, the portal is one-way except for light. I can't actually do two-way portals, if I want that I have to make two of them."

"Huh! Is there a reason light's the exception?"

"I think it has to do with how I got the magic in the first place; it happened in an unusual way that sometimes has side effects like that. It's kind of complicated, to explain, though."

"I'm listening if you're willing to get into it."

"Sure." She sits, leaning against one of the stone outcroppings. "My world actually has two magic systems; the other one just happens to people, instead of anyone being in control of it. What happens with that is that you get inspired, and can't really focus on anything else except making the artifact that the magic is inspiring you to make. It's kind of dangerous, people go insane sometimes if they can't find the materials they need, but if they make their artifact, it's magic, and sometimes it's a kind of thing that nobody has seen before - a new tool, sometimes, or a weapon, or clothing or armor that helps whoever wears it. And that happened to me, and my artifact is the mental tool, called a spell form, that I use to cast with. And I think being able to make portals that have light come through the wrong way is the artifact magic of my spell form."

"I was following that until you said 'the artifact magic of my spell form'."

"Like - you could have an artifact bowl that turned water you poured into it into soup; turning water into soup would be the bowl's artifact magic. The spell form isn't a thing in the real world, like a bowl is, but it's still a thing that exists and can have artifact magic like that."

"I'm still not sure I get it."

She shrugs. "I'm not sure how else to explain it."

"Oh well. So this cave is - in Milliways?"