"It's not even the biggest city in the country but it's up there, I think top ten?"

"How many people live in the biggest one?"

"Daasen's got... six, seven million people? Plus suburbs."

"Wow. I was planning on looking into countries and borders and geopolitics stuff at the library later, but wow it must get complicated with so many people—and I expect lots of countries, too?"

"A few dozen? It gets complicated, some things are all on top of each other."

"What do you mean, on top of each other?"

"Like fairies are yea big," she gestures, "and often have entire fairy cities in, like, parks inside cities for larger people, and self-govern but don't do international politics on their own, just through the host country."

"Oh. That's fascinating. Do fairies have their own magic like dragons, too?"

"No, but they can be wizards or whatever."

"Apparently I'm the only one who can't."

"Wolves can't, they don't have hands, and sprites can't because they can't talk."

"It's kinda weird that this magic needs these two specific kinds of actions to be done."

"There might be another way to do it - fairies and pixies use different spells than we do, so do merfolk - but nobody's found one."

"And that also sounds like exactly the kind of problem I might be able to help solve—or figure out that and why it's unsolvable."

"How would you do that?"

He shrugs. "Look at the magic, figure out how it's interacting with gestures and words, figure out why and whether that can be attached to anything else, whether that's a fundamental aspect of it or other ways of accessing it just happen to be harder to lock on for some reason. My kind of mage's whole schtick is understanding magic, reading it like a book—a bit like a book in a foreign language I don't speak but yeah."

"But like would you look at wizards or at sprites or what."

"I'd look at as much as I could. Watching any magic of a given kind at all is—sufficient for me to understand it; but watching people use it, or fail to use it, or do different things with it, or have them explain it to me, taking the book in a foreign language metaphor a step further, is like getting a sort of dictionary, or a large corpus in that language plus a translation—it helps me understand the magic faster and more efficiently and not accidentally go off on a fruitless tangential misunderstanding."

"Oh. Well, you landed in a wizardry school so there'll be lots of wizards to look at."

"Yeah. Speaking of which, how about that one classmate of yours you wanted to wave me at?"

"Nemaar? Uh, the whole thing kind of spiraled out of control and I don't think we're going to go out of our way to show off how we summoned you to anyone."

"Makes sense, I guess. Why'd you want to show that to him in specific?"

"He'd been making fun of Saasnil. She got me to help."

"Fun of her... because she can't summon people?"

"Complicated spells in general... I don't know why she picked summoning in specific."