« Would've left me open to the others, it is in fact possible to use information gleaned from Beholding to do a lot of not-directly-supernatural good, and my dad was born in 1789. I wasn't going to go his route but I did in fact have hopes of living for a very long time without killing anybody. »

Nod nod.

« My dad...more or less quit being evil to marry my papa. It's more complicated than that and I would not make any claims at all that he qualifies as a good person, but he is not currently causing problems. »

"...oh no that's so romantic though."

"Well. Yes. But I don't generally lead with that to people at whom the romance is not pointed."

"Understandable, just. Aww."

"Dad doesn't qualify as a good person but he is a very good partner and parent. I love him immensely."

She taps her pen thoughtfully on her notebook. "So if they have ages - where do they come from originally, what process makes these fears accrete into thingamajigs whereas the fear of... uh... well, I guess most things I'm thinking of could stretch into one of these if you were very generous, but why isn't there an entity that is centrally about the fear of, say, falling behind in math, or the thing where you have insomnia and you're making it worse by freaking out about how you need to fall asleep immediately if you want to get even five hours of sleep, then four, then three..."

"That's a very good question. Unfortunately there are a lot of answers I don't in fact have, particularly involving whys--most of the research we're able to do involves looking at what happens, practically speaking, on the ground. Whatever the magic version of the microscope is, we haven't invented yet. And trying to do experiments and not just observational studies has the obvious ethical, uh, intense screaming. We do know that they've been around in one form or another for a very long time--occasionally archaeologists will turn up something that was magical when it went into the ground and is still magical now, and we catch wind of it--but the sleep thing isn't a stretch at all, that's just very straightforward Spiral. One relevant thing is that while the greater Fear entities themselves have very broad umbrellas, it isn't the case that all or even necessarily most supernatural happenings are the result of humans who have tapped into the Fears; when I say monsters, with respect to my home dimension, what I mean is beings who exist, as far as we can tell, fully emergently from the Fears themselves. And those can get very specific."

"Huh.

"- did I ever tell you what my affinity is? It's metamagic."

"--Oh, that is magnificent. And absolutely makes sense of what you've mentioned about it, although no, you hadn't said."

"I like it a lot. Counterspells, disenchantments, divination specific to other magic in particular... that's why I was commenting on what I could see on you when you first arrived, I've got a good magic-seeing spell."

"Pleeeeeeeease teach it to me? I'm reasonably confident my affinity is divinations at this point."

"Sure." It's in Mandarin.

Kareen learns it both in-affinity fast and Anything You Can Do fast. 

"Nia has suggested holding a study group in here to take advantage of You Can Teach Better and I think it's a good idea."

"What would you teach?"

"Well it would presumably involve taking advantage of Anything You Can Do at the same time. But, also, languages."

"Your language magic gives you a sufficient - gears level understanding of the grammar and stuff? - also now that I think about it I was able to get a remarkably complete version of the entity list down considering that I didn't start out taking notes from the beginning, I guess that's how that'd manifest..."

"I expect to be less helpful at anything involving explicit syntax rules, but I can absolutely hold conversations and immersion is considered part of the gold standard for language learning, generally."

"Yeah, I guess that'd help for a lot of people - I do more 'trying to read stuff with a dictionary at hand' than 'trying to hold a conversation' personally but there's all sorts."

"My intuition is that the latter would be important for being able to recite poetry well but I'm not enough of a poetry person that I would expect to have especially high-quality intuition there. I can also write things down."

"I practice talking too but not for vocab and grammar, just as its own subskill."

"I think conversations are good for accent and elocution and not just vocab and grammar."

"I think that depends? In New Orleans the enclave kids and local non-enclave wizards go to local French immersion elementary schools - I didn't, I learned French from my mom who did this when she was a kid - and as a result wind up with a kind of Cajun dialect. We can cast spells by Parisians and by Quebecois and by Algerians without having to mimic their accents. You have to get the sounds right but you don't have to be quite that - imitative."

"Oh, huh. That makes perfect sense and does rather change things, yes."