Kaede's flying with purpose. He has Information and a little artefact to prove his Information is correct. This will be grand. He's flying and he's grinning and life's (reasonably) good (terms and conditions apply).
There is a duckton of magic in here. None of it is magic he has ever seen. He is standing in a circle that is somehow magical, there are several objects that are magical but not artefacts, there is some ambient magic, and there is weird magic inside the two of them.
What.
"I'm. Gonna need something a bit less local than this."
"I'm not particularly used to magic being able to have such strong opinions about what I do to it, even wards. Anyway, people from my world don't know about other worlds, I'm pretty sure, I only just inferred their existence by you and how different the magic here is, I am kinda freaking out. I mean, it's really cool and stuff, but I feel somewhat iffy about the ethics of importing a rando from another world and then exporting them without so much as a by your leave, and if you have this world-interaction ability at your disposal just like that I'd really love it if you wouldn't send me back immediately."
(And in the meantime he'll do some more metaphorical squinting at the ward to see whether he can find anything like a weak spot or—well, just understand it.)
"I'm glad you summoned me, in particular, I'm not sure summoning random people is a good idea, in general, and I'd like you to not unsummon me—for now, anyway."
Sure, but is there a source, is there a battery, is it embedded on anything, would it contain his magic... He's not asking any questions consciously, merely looking and trying to get more information. He doesn't even want to do anything to it, it's a very sensible idea, but he's kinda tickled by it.
"We haven't even shown you to Nemaar yet," agrees Brown.
The ward draws power from THAT ENORMOUS THING OF POWER ALL OF EVERYWHERE IT IS VERY BIG. He cannot magic through the ward unless his magic happens to carry on pure light or sound, or count for a very rigorous definition as "air".
"Okay. So let me try to make my pitch: my world has several problems which it needn't have, and here you have magic powerful enough to pull people from another world. I think this is enough magic to fix a lot of them. I might have magic that will help you fix problems in your world, unless you don't have them, in which case I appeal to your sense of altruism instead."
"I would imagine you're not. But I am here now, and it may be—something—of me to say so but sitting on a pool of resources like this when I could be using them to help people—not my style."
He continues looking at the ward, trying to understand it, see what makes it tick, surely there's a way to make it go away, even temporarily.
He does not particularly care about the ward's opinions. It takes a long time to understand magic where he's from, anyway, he's fine with taking a long time to figure this one out, too. It's not like he's doing anything other than look.
"Observe me not suggesting you take down the ward or let me out. I'm pretty willing to be in a ward here or elsewhere for however long it takes to prove I'm not a threat."
"'Cause you just contacted a world you know nothing about. If I'm lying, then your mum figuring that out will put all of this to an end, and you might get scolded or grounded. If I'm telling the truth, there are all kinds of potential trades our worlds would probably greatly benefit from, and several hundred thousands, perhaps millions of lives—on my side, don't know your population—could be improved beyond their dreams."
He runs a hand through his hair, looking frustrated. "I'm not sure how many more shows of good faith I need. It's a good rule that you shouldn't let me out, but I'm pretty sure it was also a rule that you shouldn't have summoned me at all, and given that you have, it's a better rule to verify."
"I would want out whether I was going to cause whatever destruction or not. Regular, non-evil people tend to also not like being inside a magical cylinder" he will understand this cylinder eventually "so it doesn't mean anything by itself. I don't want you to get expelled, but I want to waste this opportunity even less."
"Not for me," he sighs, "but regardless, I don't want to get her expelled, and if this is a hard constraint we just have to think around it. Your mum could somehow determine whether I'm speaking the truth, and I expect it involves some mind stuff, given your reference to a 'mindlink' which would also make the prospect of hiding it from your father the headmaster untenable. Does nobody else have similar magic? What other similar resources are there?"
"You could do lie detection and I could fully describe my magic and everything I can do with it and you could see that it won't be a threat? Or, at least, it will be a containable threat—I'm pretty sure your magic has mine beat in most situations, I'm having a real hard time understanding this ward."
"My type of mage can see—and usually manipulate—other magic. We can't produce any magic of our own, at least not of the kinds in my world, but we can detect all of it—and apparently detect magic here, too. I'm mildly confident I could figure out how to undo this ward if I spent long enough staring at it, but that would be rude."
"I'm definitely going to want to learn to do that. The ward, I mean. Wizardry in general." He stands up, dusting himself. "—is Saasnil going to be expelled? Because although I understand the general principle behind the rule I don't feel it's warranted in this particular situation..."
"Saasnil is in an enormous amount of trouble but may not be outright expelled," says Keo, glancing at Saasnil, who shrinks under her gaze. "Same goes for Korulen." Korulen flinches. "In the meantime, what do you need to be comfortable here for a while? The problem that stuck you here will not apply to anyone competently summoned, so anyone you want to contact from home can be fetched, and we can send and summon written correspondence the same way."
"I don't really have anyone I need to talk to, but unless I get my hands on some magical artefacts or scrolls from back home or get some brand new magic here I will eventually run out." He pokes his backpack, on the floor, with a foot. "I got a couple of things here, so that's still a week or two out, maybe, depending. Other than that, er, I guess a place to sleep and a way to get food and stuff?"
He hoists his backpack over his shoulder again and gives Saasnil and Korulen a two finger wave before following. "My kind of magic is basically being able to see and manipulate magic, including using magic I wasn't born with—at least from my world. So I might still be able to figure out a way to make myself 'have been born' with the potential."
It is a translation spell. It will hang out on Kaede and translate things. It's not translating things right now, Keo's just actually speaking his language and does not need his translated for her either.
"I wouldn't normally call a spell like that a permanent effect, since it can be easily reversed, but yes."
The calendar and time system are different. The planet is an only child, and it's square, and it orbits a sun, and there is a hemispherical moon which goes around the planet, and also there is air between all these objects.
If you're not near enough a flat surface you do not have a down, and float.
The moon is a long flight for a dragon or scoot but not completely intractable as a day trip for either. The sun is farther than that, it would take all weekend probably to fly there. The sun is a ball of fire and the moon is a rock and they have always been there. The stars are more balls of fire.
The square is ten miles thick and 1500 miles to an edge. The oceans are here between the continents, see, and yes those two have corners. Yes. Yes. (The other planets are also various flat regular polygons. Mostly regular polygons. There's an isosceles triangle someone discovered six years ago and it's very exciting.)
Are these colours species or what? They apparently can cross-breed, how's that interact with colours? What are the differences between the colours, other than, you know, colours?
(And he makes a mental note to look into geopolitics.)
(...and he makes a physical note to look into geopolitics because he's sure he'll forget otherwise.)
Dragons can interbreed with anything they damn well please, apparently, that's one of the many enviable magic powers, but insofar as Elcenia seems to construe species the colors are not their own species. They also have different cosmetic features like horns and spines and stuff per color. There is a very slight statistical tendency for intercolor offspring to take after the mother's color when there is one mother and one father; statistics are pending on same-sex couples.
There are the extra magic ones and the suuuuuper extra magic ones. There are various ages; they can live to be 2-4,000 years old if they get past the infant mortality stage. (Hella infant mortality.) Some of them are parunias, which means they turn out as dragons even though one of their parents is a nondragon.
............what.
Why, exactly, can they not fly? Is it something physical or what?
Okay so either they are wrong about shrens being physically different or they're wrong about flight being powered by physics. He's betting on the latter.
He reads up some more on dragons and then decides he'd better take Keo up on that shopping suggestion before it gets too late. He returns the books to their appropriate shelves and goes back to Korulen's room.
"My world has four kinds of mages, and my kind cannot generate any magic for themself. We can, however, see, sense, manipulate, and borrow magic of the other three kinds, and I can see all—or, at least, a lot—of the magic around here, so I expect I'll be able to figure out a way to get some for myself. If I can't then eventually I'll run out of mana and be unable to do any kind of magic."
"It's a primitive mental action, for my kind of mage. With my kind of magic, I can just see it, and metaphorically reach for it and... take it. The wizardry reservoir did not like my first attempts but I might try something after I find out more about it, usually borrowing is easy and doesn't need understanding but that may be because my kind of magic knows innately more about the other three kinds than it does about this world's kinds."
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."
"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."
"Still, if I could watch someone cast that spell and watch their channelling capacity and the reservoir at the same time and see how they interact, I might find a way to replicate the effect on myself, or maybe get a spell that would do it. That might double as a way to make people get more channelling capacity, too, without needing the familiar."
"Biggest problem is there isn't anywhere to flee to, because of historical reasons the whole continent has exactly three countries and the three are under the same religion. The planet's north hemisphere—planets in my universe are spheres, all of them—is mostly inaccessible because of a magical storm, and there's a pretty much unexplored continent to the west where some people live but not many."
"Huh. That's a better analogue for what my magic's like than the other kinds I've seen. The one in two hundred figure is more or less how many people do turn out to get their magic, but how many people are born mages is less clear, because to get magic you have to—try to use it, and it's a primitive mental action but it's not obvious at all and it's different from person to person and kinda ineffable. When someone manages to figure it out we say they've Expressed their magic, 'cause it's something they always had before and just had to release. Metamancers—my kind of mage—can detect magic early on, but, taboo."
"Each time, it's not really designed for people who change a lot, but I think the spell's not very complicated, Saasnil could probably cast it and it'd take a few seconds once she had some practice - and Dad will make her do it since he's looking for ways for us to make up for stranding you."
"Find ancient ruins and cheat at magic to get money, drop some of that into charity, sure, help young people develop magic, rise in the ranks of the Explorers' Guild to get some political capital, look for the fabled group of subversives who don't think metamancers are corrupted and doomed to damnation."
So he'll get something about introductory wizardry and something about that pattern where the reservoir changes size every now and then and check them out and return to his room to read them and/or stare at magical things until...
...he should probably eat soon, shouldn't he, what time is it?
He shrugs. "Can't really explain it, or understand without looking any further, and the sense doesn't translate neatly to, like, vision or anything. But. It doesn't look like it's a... neat round thing that could heal anyone of anything? Or not like what I'd expect it to look if it were that."
"I can see magic, for a certain value of 'see,' and I get almost zero intuition for it while I'm looking, and would have to learn to interpret it and stuff to draw any more conclusions. Knowing more, on a conscious level, about it helps draw the correct conclusions and make the right inferences to figure it out. I can also manipulate magic—at least magic from my world, wizardry does not lend itself to much manipulation easily and I haven't tried anything else—and borrow it, which I also haven't tried."
"I'm speculating, here. In my world, I can borrow the mana, the fuel of the other three kinds of mage, and then use that mana to perform their kinds of magic. I can't make someone stop being a mage. Here, though, stuff might be different, because there isn't an obvious fuel I can take some of or put back, so it might well be that I'd take 'being-a-light,' or it might be that since magic here's infinite I'd just get some of this endless well."
"It's hard to explain. It's not with my hands but the way it—feels, sort of, when I borrow magic, is that I'm reaching for it and actually grabbing it, and it's sort of the same thing except without grabbing it. Poking it, following a magical thread, provoking a reaction. Like, as a hypothetical example... I might be able to make your magic think it was healing some injury if I poked it the right way, and see how it reacted when that happened."
"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."
"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."
"Oh. Depends on which kind of mage you are. An enchanter could maintain artefacts for a living, or study old ones to figure them out, or make new ones and sell them, perhaps specialising in certain types of artefacts. An arcanist could sell spell scrolls, or work on spell refinement research, or work in communications or as attendant for royalty. An elementalist could help build things, explore, work in law enforcement, get lots of cognitive boosts and learn a lot of things. And a metamancer needs to hide that fact if they want to not be beheaded."
"Well, I was inside a ward that was as solid as they get, I'm told, and I tried to do—anything to it, but it was kinda rude to me and I never got anywhere before the ward was unmade. I also tried getting some wizardry for myself but the reservoir wouldn't let me. That's the extent to which I tried anything, I think there's a thing I can see that's someone's Channelling Capacity and I'm wondering whether I can change it."
"One in about two hundred people, in my world, when they try to perform magic, succeed. What this trial looks like varies from person to person and is very hard to describe because doing magic is a primitive mental action, but after they do they get some intuition for how to use their type of magic. When I was around three or four years old I tried Expressing my magic and I succeeded."
"Mmmmore or less. The sense doesn't actually immediately tell me what the magic I'm looking at is. It gives me a vague notion, sometimes—like, I could see the part of a light that was, sort of, missing, that corresponded to how they can't affect themselves or other lights—but I have to analyse it for a long time, and sometimes poke it, to figure it out—I had to be told about this limitation, otherwise it might've taken me hours."
Aww. He follows.
"It's... a bit like getting more and more resolution out of a picture, and noticing more and more details. In practice, I start discovering small things like whether a bit of the magic is voluntary and to what sorts of thoughts and emotions it's tied and which bit of the magic is doing which part of the effect—this bit interprets that, this bit translates it into the actual mechanics of the effect—things like that."
"If I looked at a bit of that magic, and tried to extrapolate from it to its most general form, being able to affect any living thing and fix anything, then the way it looked like, for lack of a better verb, was not the same way the thing I was actually looking at was, but it was almost."
"Oh. I guess the best one would be if I saw a bit of a sphere I'd imagine a whole sphere and then the thing I actually saw was a sphere with a dent? But that's way more blatant than what it actually was, and needs less context—perhaps, hmm, seeing a picture of a dog's nose and being told it's a dog, and then it turns out the dog doesn't have its tail?"
"You don't have dogs...? Well no reason to expect all animals to be the same, they're like small wolves—do you have those?—that are kept as pets... Anyway, no, in this analogy I've an idea of what dogs are like—I'd been told that the light magic was meant to heal and to be very general and I'd seen healing magic back in my world which doesn't automatically translate but gives some idea, and I saw her using light so I saw it—flexing, in a way."
"It is very multidimensional and very fuzzy but if given three broad categories I could probably give you a guess of which is more similar to which. Without looking at it, though, it'd be a guess; magic is very personal where I'm from and here it really isn't so that might affect things somehow."
"All magical effects, with potentially one huge exception, are caused by mages, and are not permanent and require mage upkeep. The way magic happens depends very heavily on mental architecture and how people organise their thoughts, and relates deeply with their psychology and personality."
"Differences in mana cost are the most obvious, and differences in specific implementation vary. For example, I once cast an invisibility spell on me and stuff I was holding that would still let me read invisible books I was holding. What that turned out to do was that when I was looking at the page I would be able to know the shape of the letters and their positions on the page without actually seeing them, but nothing like their colour or the letters on the back of any pages. Someone else doing the same spell might have been able to see colour, or to not need to see the letters themselves and only the words as indivisible concepts, or stuff like that."
"The spellcasting procedure is just performing the incantation—actions or gestures or whatever—and having enough mana to cast it, and thinking about the target when applicable. But before an arcanist can cast a spell they have to bind it to the incantation, and that's a primitive mental action that attaches an internal description of the effects desired to the incantation. That's why it's idiosyncratic."
"It's the best way to describe it. In the same sense telling your arm to move is a primitive mental action doing magic is a primitive mental action. It's not like anything else except in the same way the action of telling your arm to move is like the action of trying to recall what an elephant looks like."
"Here goes, then - actually hang on a tick I need to take notes -" He casts something; paper flies to his hand from some kind of supply cabinet elsewhere in the library. He writes down the name of the spell in the book, then casts that.
All the wizardry in the area is alive with informatively colored light.
Lots in the library. All the books have a dab of magic on them, and that supply cabinet, and the circulation desk, and the light filtering down from the ceiling, and the ward around the building. Some students milling around have one or more spells on them and many carry magic objects.
"That was a metaphorical where, but that, also, partly. There's a sense in which it is, I can see what a magic thing's attached to, more or less, and the way it's attached to it—but I wouldn't have found this connection, here between this book and the circulation desk and its shelf unless I was actively looking for it or knew it must be there."
"They're attached but the vision metaphor is very loose. It has way more than just three dimensions and a spectrum of colours to look at, and without knowing that this bit of magic here was supposed to be connected to another bit of magic elsewhere I might not have figured that out for a while."
"Not spatial ones, or not exactly. There's just a certain sense in which a certain magical effect is distributed along certain axes and those axes are not limited to the three spatial ones but they are... somewhat... analogous. I'm running into the limit of my ability to verbalise this."
"No, pushy magic theoretician is exactly what I was looking for, the fact that he happens to be immensely attractive is only a bonus. Anyway, way this sense works, magic has something that is analogous to a shape, but it exists in way more than just three dimensions and is not at all physical and somewhat but not completely correlated with what the magic does. Elementalist blessings, where I'm from, are almost invariably surrounding the mage's body, but some are more heavily distributed in specific places, like around the head for cognitive ones. I guess you could say that I can also see a projection of n-dimensional structure onto three-dimensional space."
"Mmmmooore or less. The thing I'm calling 'staring' or learning more things could also be described as this adjustment of perspective. And figuring out new dimensions the magic actually occupies is another part of it, and adding a new dimension means having a lot more freedom for perspective changes."
"They don't really have meanings, they're just, sort of—like up and down, left and right, not particularly privileged, just another metaphorical place things can vary along... You know it's really annoying not having any vocabulary for this, I'd never tried explaining any of this before."
Kaylo blinks at him, then says, "We hatch in dragon form and when we're twenty or so we start being able to adopt new forms, which are then thereafter accessible to turn into and retain objects tucked away with them like my clothes. It's just like vampire or thudia shapeshifting except that the forms aren't fixed and we get more of them, five is standard, blue-groups get ten, unusual nonblues get four unique nonblues get three unusual and unique blues get unlimited, once picked a form is what it is indefinitely except most sapient forms grow to maturity along with a juvenile dragon which is why I look sixteen but if I turned into a cat, say, I would be an adult cat. The transformation is genuinely instantaneous. Shifting requires that at least a small part of the first and second forms be spatially overlapping but allows otherwise free positioning."
"Unusuals and uniques get extra magic of the kind that their color group already gets extra of, uniques more so - you ever get a look at Keo, she's a unique. Anybody besides a unique blue just picks species, otherwise luck of the draw - except fullblooded dragons match our same sex parents when being matching species - and yes, same sex all the time."
"Uh - okay, take your time system. I don't know how long an hour is but I know it's sixty seconds and one-twenty-fourth of your world's days, because that's about how words relate directly, definitionally, to each other. So if I have a word, I can get that kind of structural information out of it and that's better than nothing."
"In that sense all the information I can get out of a bare language is self-referential. But it's still useful to be able to note that something's a comparative and there's separately a superlative or that it's grammatically incorrect to refer to something in the plural or whatever."
"Unsolved problem," says Kaylo, "we don't even know what channeling capacities are, not really - but a lot of people barely use theirs, you could probably find someone willing to have it poked easier than you could find a dragon willing to play around with our capacity to use language."
"We can get it hotter and farther and have better fine control over it - nothing outright pyrokinetic, more like, I can do a thinner line of it," he demonstrates, "a non-red-group would probably not be able to narrow it any farther than," demo. "The unusuals and uniques do get pyrokinetic. Oh, we also have better fire resistance - no dragon's going to be hurt stepping on a campfire but red-groups like curling up in bonfires and the others don't, say, I'd be cozy swimming around in the sun."
"Red's fire, brighter red is color group extra fire, blue's shapeshifting in five shades for five compartments, green's language, gray is the fancy dragon reproductive magic package, if you were looking at a different color they'd have a different brighter extra bit - violet, white, and black would not be doing the different shades of an existing color thing, and blue unusuals wouldn't have the shifting compartments, just a bigger brighter blob."
"Sometimes it's not, but usually it's a matter of who wrote it. This only works if one person wrote it; it gets muddled if the sign was agreed on by a committee and then painted by somebody who didn't speak Alteisec at all or something. Subjectively it's sort of like picking out an accent."
"Several things. The backpack is one, it stretches space inside it, and I have a tent that does the same in it as well. I have a pan that auto-heats and a bottle that keeps temperature stable—although there's only a little bit of magic there, mostly it's just physics—I have my Explorers' Guild Token—" He reaches inside his shirt to reveal the stone disc pendant with symbols and swirly patterns that glows blue when not hidden.
"Yeah, there's definitely things like that, and also I'm not sure how useful they'll be while you're staying here eating at the cafeteria. Although it's also possible you could sell them off as curiosities what with their not being wizard things. Come to think of it I probably ought to get working on an analysis for your magic system and have a look at them."
"I guess, but I'm not sure I'll have much use for currency here, either—the school will cover food and lodging and at least basic necessities like clothes and there's the library so at least in the short-term future I don't expect to need anything. And yeah, I can try to help you come up with an analysis like that."
"Hmm... well, there should be three colour groups, I think, one for each type of mage. If you can manage to see metamancy, too, go ahead and make that a colour as well, but I'm not sure to what extent it's distinct enough in the same dimension for that. Beyond that, artefacts' charge is fairly important, and which part of their physical aspects are being affected by magic; quantity of mana in general would be interesting to know; I'm not sure if you can identify with that which or at least how many spells an arcanist has bound or an elementalist has found..."
"People see magic as a gift from the gods, there are a bunch of taboos about using it in public at all except under some special or specific circumstances, and metamancy in particular is seen as evil—I'm not at all sure how they'll react to an entirely different world with different magic contacting them."
"Their magic is more personal—elementalists have blessings, which are magical powers on themselves. Stuff like flight or controlling the elements or telekinesis or sped up cognition or breathing underwater. They can only have one blessing active at a time, and have a lot of intuitive access to it—there isn't a whole lot of experimentation you need to do as an elementalist, you just think of a power and switch to it and it works like you expect it to."
"Yeah, one element per is how it works for us, too, and it's—complicated? And changes from person to person, sometimes, but basically if two 'different powers' are just basically different descriptions of the same thing, then they're the same power—like, flight and levitation and selective immunity to gravity are the same thing. The different elements are distinct powers, and telekinesis is distinct from them, but controlling heat is usually the same as pyrokinesis, for instance."
He shrugs. "It's a cultural thing, probably. The fact that there are so few of us and as far as anyone can tell chosen randomly from the general population means that there are not a lot of mages who would naturally pursue research, and without a strong pro-research meta-culture like arcanists in general have it'll be hard to find. But metamancers can mimic pretty much any kind of mage—I can convert the different types of mana to one another and be indistinguishable from the real thing if all my mana is converted to a single type."
"Yes, sir," he says, grinning. "The things we call 'spells' are temporary effects triggered by certain actions when performed by an arcanist, a metamancer with arcanist mana, or someone with a scroll made by an arcanist. The exact combination of effect and action is consciously and, lacking metamancer help, permanently bound by arcanists individually, so every spell not in a scroll was effectively designed by the caster.
"Since I am a metamancer I can bind spells for a single use and then unbind them whenever. If I wanted a telepathic effect to communicate that to you all I'd have to do is fully specify it and then choose which actions of mine would trigger it, but I am limited by what I can properly specify which is why I think Keo might have an easier time. I can do a something for just now, though."
"Anything that—I guess 'can convey meaning' is as good a way to describe it as any. Gestures, spoken words, written words. There's a tradeoff between mana cost and complexity and usability—a spell's cost is determined when it's bound, and it depends on what the spell does, but gets cheaper the longer and more involved the incantation is. Also gets cheaper when the incantation is in some way related to the actual spell—a fire spell with the word fire would cost less than one with the word water instead."
"Not really. The only way the actual informational content of an incantation is used to affect its spell's mana cost is in how 'commonly' it's related to the spell's effect—a fire spell using the word 'fire' in a common language costs less mana than one using 'fire' in a dead language which costs less mana than one using 'fire' in a conlang you invented for yourself, and writing that book would be pretty much the same thing as this last idea."
<Thank you! Oh and, two other things: one, can I look at your magic at some point? I'm trying to figure dragon magic out, and I'm at the point where there'll be more gains from variety than from just looking at Kaylo. And two, is Korulen free to take me shopping again today? I wanna look at potions and see whether those are ambiguously sentient and want to kill me.>
"No idea. It doesn't necessarily mean anything like what it looks like, and this world's magic is—very different and varied. I'd need to look at it longer. You don't know of any magic you might have that other people don't? And that, oh, she does?" he points. "And him, and him, and her, and him?"
"Mmm, yeah, but my thing is seeing and manipulating magic, I can't make any of my own and need to borrow—or steal—from elsewhere. And I apparently cannot use wizardry at all, it does not like being touched by anyone without a CC, it appears." Pause. "Or at least me in specific, guess it needn't generalise."
"Yes, 'um,' that's what I meant. I just wonder how the magic—transfers—if thudias can have thudia children but not dragons then the magic's probably getting copied somehow, and thudias themselves must come about because only a bit and not all of the dragon magic's being passed on and I wanna know why."
"Like, when a dragon has a child with a nondragon they can have a thudia or a parunia and thudias are always the same, they always get exactly those bits of the magic and not others. Or, put another way, it's divided consistently and discretely enough that you can actually tell that a child will either be a thudia or a parunia."
"Hmm, most people don't? More details to the spell means more details to keep track of, means they need to spend longer concentrating on it and if they slip up they're stuck with the incomplete or incorrect spell forever, plus it's harder to make sure the mana allocation is efficient. I don't need that, I can watch my work as I go and make changes on the fly and hold the spell half-formed in my mind if I need a break."
"They can write it all down and be as detailed as they want on paper, you don't need to hold the whole spell in your mind, you can even read it as you set it—but if you stop reading it, if you think about something else or pay attention to something else and don't have a metamancer handy then that's it."
"History's not very well-documented, like I said. Which is funny if you think of how much tech they had, but the fact that there is a whole Guild for Historians might explain it—they could just have some widespread conspiracy to keep ancient history books from leaking or something."
"You start as junior apprentice even relative to people younger or lower equivalence than you, they get certain limited ability to boss you around too, Ahin may delegate teaching duties to us, you are not entitled by this apprenticeship to any specific amount of Ahin's own time, abuse of the employee discount gets you booted... uh, questions?"
"I'm from another world, got stranded here accidentally, can see magic, can convert potions into my world's kind of magic and also it's the only kind I can actually use here so that makes it incredibly interesting. Er, as for me me, I'm—curious altruistic ambitious extroverted sociable impatient intelligent diligent energetic dramatic—those might be a good ten adjectives?"
"Well, since different spells or artefacts or blessings or whatever work off individual mental architecture, even spells that ostensibly do the same thing can cost different amounts of mana for different people. And people Express at different ages, and when they do they spend different amounts of mana, and they don't have very good internal measurements of how much mana they have and only moderately good intuitions for how much mana, relatively, different things intuitively cost. End result is a lack of consensus on whether elementalists have the same mana cap per blessing, or whether it makes sense to say different blessings have the same cap, or whether mages recharge mana at the same rate, stuff like that."
"It's 'cause spells are subtly different because people think about and relate to them differently. Like—I think I mentioned my read-while-invisible spell, when I don't fill in every little gap in defining the effect it makes invisible books readable by making every letter on the page identifiable but things like colour aren't, and someone else binding a similar spell might get something like meanings embedded on the paper or something different depending on what they think of as 'reading' and 'visible while invisible' and what-have-you."
"Sometimes, but if you hire an arcanist to do things for you, or an enchanter, or whatever, you can go a long way. And the situations where they'd have to demonstrate are very rare—doing magic has religious connotations, it's supposedly a gift from the gods and shouldn't be used casually. Of course, every now and then someone is found out and then excommunicated for pretending."
"Is there anyone other than Keo I could bother about maybe bouncing a couple subjective experiences to you? Maybe a wizardry spell—although maybe your analysis will be sufficient and I should just let you work on it while I work on a vocabulary—and maybe then draconic would come up with the appropriate words I could borrow..."