"Just unaging. Indestructibility's separate."

"And you can't do that one?"

"Nope, that's a hex. My alt developed it."

"Well, hopefully they find us before I need that."

"Yeah. None of you should do dangerous stuff, I can do all of that."

What an opportune moment for Miles to return.

"I was distracting Grandda but now he's having a nap," he announces. "And I told Sergeant Bothari we're talking to our invisible friend so now he thinks you're imaginary so please don't do anything to contradict that assumption until Mama gets here. Now what'd I miss?"

"There are eight more of me and they do... lots of things, mostly fix up worlds they find, and they will find us eventually probably but not right away so we will have to do some fixing of this world without them."

"Da and Mama will help with the world-fixing I bet," says Miles. "But Mama first."

"Yep, he wanted to know if I had good grownups and I do."

"We have the best grownups," Miles asserts. "Anyway what else?"

"There's lots of stuff. Um there's evil gods some of me have to fight but I don't think we have any here it's not that kind of world... oh and I'm magic somehow but we don't know how to find out what kind of magic and he can figure out where I'm from, I was born on Earth but I want to wait to find out how I got here till Mama's here."

"You're magic?" he says, impressed. "Huh. Am I magic? Is Mama? Is Da?"

"Didn't check yet, I was thinking it's about how I'm very mysterious, but maybe more people are also magic..."

"I bet you're not the only person who's magic in the entire universe," he says, thinking it through, "and if you were born on Earth then it's probably a good guess that there are a bunch of magic people there, and Earth is where humans came from in the first place so if some people on Earth are magic then there could be magic people anywhere, it's not like how if there were magic Cetagandans it'd probably be some kind of genetic engineering thing that only the Cetagandans had. Everybody could be magic and not know it."

"There might also not be a lot, though, most people are not untraceable doorstep basket people so if it's to do with that..."

"Yeah. It's hard to say when you only know about one magic person. Actually, it'd be a really good idea to check a bunch of Barrayarans for being magic, because if we find any that means it's something that originated on Earth before Barrayar was colonized, there's nowhere else that was isolated for six hundred years so we could tell that easily... how do you check if a person's magic, anyway? And come to think of it, if we check a bunch of Barrayarans and lots of them are magic we should also check a bunch of people who've never been to Barrayar in case it's Barrayar making people magic..."

"I can just check."

Miles: is magic.

He's slightly too distracted to properly appreciate this fact.

"How does checking work - does it run out of a resource, or anything - would it be a bad idea to check if everyone we've ever met is magic right now?"

"No, all my powers are unlimited - well, technically Gem thinks that if I stopped being really happy to be a demon then I might sometimes have trouble making it work but being a demon is totally amazing so that's not likely to happen. I check by trying to make you; if you're magic it won't work."

"...so if you checked hundreds of people and lots of them weren't magic you'd end up with a big pile of - people?"

"Not like people people just people-shaped thingies."

"Still probably not something we want a big pile of behind Grandda's house," he says, and bounces impatiently. "But I want to find out who's magic and why and where it comes from..."

"I could teleport them away. I'm not really supposed to do that for waste-disposal but space is big."

"Why aren't you supposed to?"

"I'm supposed to think about how I'll get rid of things before I make them. Otherwise you get Hell and Hell is tacky."