“Honestly I don’t think it would be her highest priority to figure out? She was—excited, about being able to do—cool things—and not dying is not an exceptionally cool thing, on a scale of a few years, when you are sixteen, and not a wizard.”

"What kinds of cool things was she excited about doing?"

“I told her people in my world had gone to the moon and she was like ‘I want to BUILD A CITY ON THE MOON’ and I told her the moon would be multiple kinds of impractical for normal people to live on and maybe she should pick a planet instead of the moon and she got me to tell her about astronomy for a while and I don’t know that much about astronomy actually but I know some poetry about astronomy and so on and she was like ‘I want to build REALLY MAGIC cities on the moon that people can live in, and DIFFERENTLY MAGIC oceans and jungles on the REST of the moon full of things designed to flourish in normal moon conditions.’”

"...well, that's... adorable, frankly, and speaks well of her general benignness... but is she going to be frustrated if people don't want to move to her moon city, or upset if she gets the magic wrong and the first people who move there die because she didn't know enough about how to keep them alive on the moon?"

"I think most people would be upset by that last one!"

"I don't disagree. The question is more what kind of upset, and whether it's the kind with destructive consequences."

"What, like, throwing a tantrum because her vision was executed imperfectly and destroying the city with survivors still in it? That seems, uh, shortsighted and dumb."

"Everybody gets a little more shortsighted and dumb when they're really upset. And it doesn't even have to be throwing a tantrum and destroying the city. Could be some other bad decision. With my kind of power it is very easy to make bad decisions with big consequences."

"I won't say I'm as smart when I'm really upset as otherwise but, like--man, I dunno, I'm having a hard time imagining doing something big and dumb without being, like, super cornered."

"Well. It happens. The easier it is to do something, the easier it is to do by mistake under pressure."

"--Yeah, that's the thing, 'whoops I fucked up real bad' doesn't seem...like...pressure? Not, like, relevantly so--it doesn't have an, immediate time element?"

He shrugs. "Depends what you fucked up and whether you think you can fix it by making another mistake real fast."

"I'm...not sure how trying to fix a moon city so it stopped killing people would make the situation worse? Like, if, if you don't do anything, everyone in the city is going to die, it seems like there isn't much you can do in that area that would make the situation worse, unless your kind of magic has something like malia that I haven't heard of yet where doing a thing is just categorically a bad idea even if it seems like it wouldn't be."

"...I don't know much about the moon, but, say, before I was good at controlling my magic I once cracked a mountain in half trying to dig a tunnel through it in a hurry. I tried to enchant a bell that could be heard anywhere in the empire and ended up making a bell so loud that if you stood next to it when it rang you'd be blown backwards and crushed to paste. I have a whole bunch of awful 'tried to heal somebody without knowing how' stories but most of them aren't me, the big mistake I made when learning to heal was I shoved too much information in my mind at once with magic and when I came to a day later my head felt like that bell from before was going off in it and also I'd been on fire the whole time and the ground where I was lying was torn up and covered in rubble because I'd been hitting myself in the head with boulders while I was out of it, probably because it felt like getting hit in the head with a boulder would make it hurt less. I make having this much power look easy because I have had five thousand years of practice. Having this much power is not actually easy and—you can't just think 'what kinds of things might a reasonable person do in that situation, and what might happen because of that', you have to think 'what kinds of things might a panicked idiot do in that situation, and how would it turn out if they accidentally did a hundred times as much of it as they meant to, or they were wrong about how something worked and accidentally did something different and worse than what they meant, or both'."

"--Oh. Okay. That makes sense, actually--it's hard to overpower a spell by accident, in my system, but you can do it, and weird things can happen when you do."

"It's hard not to overpower things, with a full slate of self-dedications. And even once you've got it mostly worked out, it's still easy to screw up when you're upset or in a hurry."

"It probably helps, for us, that our strength doesn't come in all at once."

"Hmm, I see what you mean. Could be."

"I was an unusually powerful small child but I don't think I ever caused a disaster by over-charging a spell. Of course, I had plenty of other outlets for destruction."