"Fewer mals, more privacy."

"Do we need to have a," half a donut goes in her mouth at once, one moment please, "private conversation?"

"Mildly? At some point. It's not urgent, but I'd rather not have it in front of everyone."

"Sure then." She makes sure all her breakfast is consolidated and offers her hand.

She takes it. 

"So firstly I want to be really clear that I'm not scolding you, or anything. But I really like El and plan to invite her to things when there are things to be invited to, and I expect it would be smoothest if this were not a surprise to you when the two of you ended up in the same place."

"Okay. I've, like, been in classes with her ever, I'm not going to go into anaphylactic shock."

"You did kind of wrinkle your nose at her the one time. I'm not expecting a catastrophe or anything, but Aadhya seems to get along with her fine and I've never seen her and Nia together, which makes you the only person with whom it seems constructive to bring up the fact that her spookiness tends to put people off apparently."

"I will be fine."

"Cool. Uh, the other thing I wanted to say that I kind of wanted privacy about, is--remember when I was explaining that Beholding doesn't really do understanding things?"

"Yes?"

"I think if we are going to be having interesting practical discussions of how my universe's magic works then I should probably actually explain how my universe's magic works, and not just talk around it delicately, but I would really rather it didn't become common knowledge until people were more used to my being around and benevolent and stuff."

"...I am all ears and no mouths." She puts the lie to that when she starts her second donut, but hopefully the intent is clear.

"So I said magic in my universe comes from different conceptual entities, and that's accurate, but what I conveniently left out is they all have a conceptual commonality, and that's fear. Beholding isn't just watching; it's the fear of being watched. It isn't just knowing; it's the fear of knowing too much. It's--you can do more good than harm with it, but--it's also approximately the most harmless of the Dread Powers."

"...yeah I can see why you wouldn't want to talk about that with the whole school till they have a few more days' worth of lunches in 'em."

Nod. "It's not great. Also some people tend to relate to the Dread Powers as gods, which--is less metaphysically important but is liable to come up a lot if I start talking about any magical humans outside my own immediate sphere."

"Less metaphysically important, what do you mean?"

"I mean that it's a feature of human psychology and not a feature of the magic system in itself."

"I mean, if they're big magic entities that want things one might as well call them gods, but I guess the word might have more baggage than you want to suggest."

"It is very true that one might as well call them gods, but if I called Beholding my god then that would definitely have baggage. Which I prefer to avoid, even though there are absolutely people back home who really wouldn't have cared how areligious I am while referring to me as a Beholding cultist."

"Ah, that makes sense, being - partial to one doesn't imply being - yeah, I get it."

Nod. "...In addition to having practical conversations about how stuff works, it's also nice to just not hide things from someone."

"...is that related to you being Beholding-partial?"

"Almost certainly! But my dad keeps so many secrets, so it's definitely not universal."

"Well, I am happy to go on being all ears if you've more to say?"

"It's actually not clear to what extent the Fears are discrete entities--there are definitely clusters, but exactly where one begins and another ends is less clear. Different cultures and esoteric traditions have different ways of categorizing them; in the circles I'm most familiar with, people usually use Smirke's Fourteen. By that designation, the fourteen powers are the Eye, the Web, the Vast, the Buried, the Lonely, the Stranger, the Spiral, the Desolation, the Slaughter, the Dark, the Hunt, the Flesh, the Corruption, and the End. --I've been familiar with these all my life so I'm not sure how obvious they all are from those names."