Hammond straightens his tie, taking a minute to admire the surroundings. For reasons of demographics, he hasn't been out in the countryside like this as frequently as he would have liked.

He steels himself and knocks on the door with an outstretched flipper.

That's odd, people don't usually knock on the door of the lake house. She goes to see who it is. She opens the door and...

That's a walrus. She takes a moment to collect herself and then asks the obvious question.

"Hello, do you usually look like a walrus?"

"I do!" he agrees with a nod. "I've been a walrus all my life. Do you have a few minutes to answer some survey questions about magic?"

"I'm not sure I've seen any magic. I guess maybe you're magical but I'm not sure. Afterall, I can talk so it's clearly possible for animals to be able to talk."

"Oh, no, I'm sorry — your universe doesn't have native magic," Hammond explains. "I am magical, but I'm from a different one. No, your universe just recently finished developing far enough that it's going to gain magic soon, and I've been sent to gather people's opinions on how it ought to work."

"That's soo cool. Sure I'm happy to answer questions. Do you want to come in? There's also a pond out back if it would be more comfortable for you to be in water."

"Yes, please. To the coming in, not to the pond — I do like the water, but my notes aren't waterproof."

He wiggles the clipboard full of papers demonstratively.

"And thank you for being willing to answer questions; you'd be amazed how many people refuse to talk to me."

"I wonder if they're just overwhelmed by the surprise of a talking walrus." She steps to the side and backs up so he can come inside and leads the way to a sitting room.

He follows her, deftly hopping up into a chair.

"Yes, well, I'm used to it; so it's hard for me to judge how shocking it would be to people here," he observes. "Although given how careful the bosses are about preventing sampling bias, I have to believe they don't think it will be a problem ..."

He trails off for a moment, and then shakes his head to recenter himself.

"Anyway — I should start by saying that we can skip any questions you want to; just let me know if you'd like to move on. The first one is pretty general: Do you think magic should be 'hard' or 'soft'? That is, should it be quantifiable, following mathematical or physical rules, or should it be more based on feelings, language, or another less formal system? And this is something of a spectrum, not just an either-or."

"I'm not really sure I have a preference. I've read good stories in both directions. And it's not like a magic system being like physics means there's less to discover. Well, some hard magic systems are really narrow, but they don't have to be."

He nods, scribbling this down on his clipboard.

With a pen held in his flipper. Somehow.

"That's perfectly fine. Is the magic system having a lot of things to discover about it important to you?"

"Yes! If you're going to have magic it shouldn't just be pressing a button in your mind to do a few specific things. That's just boring. I also want magic to be something anyone can use. Otherwise I might not get a chance to use it."

"That makes sense!" he agrees. "How do you feel about magical abilities being 'continuous' versus 'discrete'? That is, should abilities be more of a spectrum of related skills and effects that you can tweak, or should they be a collection of individual, specific effects — a large collection, that is?"

"I'd prefer continuous if I'm understanding you correctly. There's a bunch of stories where people can invent spells and then other people learn them but I've always assumed that there's a lot of other spells that could be invented that just haven't been yet. And I'd want that to be true if magic was about casting spells."

"When you say 'if magic was about casting spells', do you just mean that as an example, or should I put it down as a conditional preference?" he clarifies.

"I mostly mean that as an example, but I would actually want that to be true if magic was about casting spells."

"Right, okay."

He jots this down.

"Anyway, yes, that is the distinction I was trying to get at. Alright ..."

He flips to the next page on his clipboard.

"You mentioned wanting magic to be something anyone can use; do you think that anyone should be able to learn some kind of magic, all kinds of magic, that magic shouldn't come in 'kinds', or something else?"

"Hmm, if there's enough magic that nobody could learn it all it would be okay if different people had different magic. It might even be more interesting that way. But I also want to be able to explore every bit of the magic so I'm not sure. Oh, that's something, I'd like it if magic had a way to live forever so that I could keep exploring and finding things out. Not a nasty one that requires killing people or something like that though."

"So would it be right to say that you would be fine with a system where people have an easier time learning different parts of magic, but that with enough effort someone could in theory learn them all?" Hammond questions.

"Oh, that would be good. Then other people would be able to teach me things. It's always good when that's true."

He notes her general preference for teachability.

"Okay — on living forever: how do you feel about an 'afterlife' system, where people have an immortal soul that persists past the 'death' of their body? I ask because those come up weirdly often."

"It would depend a lot on the afterlife. Anything where people are tortured forever or even just punished forever for what they do while they're alive for a limited time would be bad."

"Entirely sensible," Hammond agrees. "So you want there to be some way of remaining alive that doesn't require killing people, and is not itself infinitely torturous or punitive, but you aren't opposed in principle to a system where people are relocated on the death of their bodies?"

She thinks about it for a moment. "Yes. I think it would be better if there was a way to come back from the afterlife but I guess that could cause problems. Being able to talk with people there might be better. Ooh! If it's retroactive we could answer so many questions about history that we don't know the answers to. Also people would be sad if the people they loved died before the afterlife started being a thing."

"Magic can definitely enable time travel," he notes. "So I don't know if you'll end up with a retroactive system in this case, but it is possible."

Normally he'd move on, but she seems to keep coming up with latent details.

"Are there any other things that you want to specify about how you'd like immortality to work? We've talked about what it shouldn't be like; what do you think it should be like?"