"If I stared for a while at the magic I could tell with certainty whether it'd be dangerous or not, but yeah, guess that'd be better."

"You'd have to be really convincing on the certainty thing."

"I can become arbitrarily certain, I just need to look at it for long enough. It's always just a matter of looking at it for long enough."

"Yeah but you'd have to convince whoever you were going to - handle."

"Yeah," he sighs. "I'll look at other magic tonight and see if I can find stuff in common. It's—interesting, that this world has so much different magic."

"Compared to what?" asks a very small person.

"Well, my world. There are the four kinds of mage but it's really sort of the same underlying—thing. It's hard to explain. Here, if there's a single underlying thing, I haven't found it yet."

"What's your world like?" the small person wants to know.

"Way different. Only humans, there, and almost no one has magic, compared to here. There are no permanent magical effects, either—everything relies on the finite amount of mana mages have. Less cultural diversity, too, after the wars of a few centuries ago—only three countries to speak of. And comparatively few people—something between a few hundred thousand and a few million."

"Wow," says an elf.

"Sounds sorta... dead," says the small person.

"I suppose it would. I never thought of it quite that way, but then again I had nothing to compare it to."

"And you got stuck here? Do you like it?" asks a human.

"Other than the 'stuck' part, I have no complaints. New magic, way more people, problems that at first glance it seems like I could be of a lot of help solving. I think I'm going to enjoy myself a lot here."

"Why is having way more people so important?"

"Well, for one, I like people. And for two, that means that if I do manage to combine our magical systems and cheat at them a lot this will cause a lot more net good in the long run."

"Even a hundred thousand people is more than you could meet in a human lifetime probably. ...Are you a human? You look like a human."

"I'm a human. I have no plans of living for only as much time as regular humans do."

"Nobody's managed that one," remarks a human.

"De-aging is actually possible with magic from my world, but generally expensive and does not scale at all well."

"Why doesn't it scale?"

"Mages that figure out they're mages are about one in two hundred people, one-third of those can only make magical artefacts that cannot do that, one-third can only do magic that affects themselves and there are mana limitations, one-third can only do instantaneous or time-limited magic and there are also mana limitations."

"Your magic system is kind of dumb."

"It's not the most helpful, no."

"What do people do with it?"

"It's not conceptually constrained. Theoretically anything you can imagine in enough detail to define can be done, if you have enough mana."