"Come again?"

He leads Johannes to a little booth where no one's likely to bother them.

"Ties to the ordinary world rather than the other one. Practitioners are on both sides of that line, me more so than most and you more than me, and your current problem can be slowed down by convincing the universe you definitely belong with people and things on the normal side."

"What's the actual consequence of slipping to the other side? Most things seem to have at least some presence in both."

"Being there's safe. People go there intentionally and come back safely. It's the getting stuck that's the problem. You'd start to lose your presence here, sort of fade. You interact with things in the spirit world and they'll move there, but here they'd have to wait for the universe to find some excuse to move or break them or whatever it takes to make them match.
People who don't see Others can't notice you. If you're unlucky, or if nothing else happens first, you don't just slip from one world to the other you slip between the cracks and get lost to both."

"...that sounds very unpleasant and badly designed."

"If it was designed at all, no one knows who did it. The unpleasantness only happens when it goes wrong; normally the spirit world is merely strange. Just, never fall between the cracks."

"Well, in any case, what's done is done, and I am now an implement. I haven't even had a chance to experiment with it to see what I got."

"Anything you've noticed so far?"

"I seem to tire less easily? And more physical... endurance, or some such."

"I would have expected more magical changes than physical, but I guess practitioners with bodies usually use them for mundane things. And you're breaking new ground here, there's not a lot of precedent."

"Not to mention the fact that I haven't actually done much magic since—well, I did have to use some to get those smelly goblins away from my clothes..."

"Goblins?"

"I, erm, kinda stripped naked for the ritual, to make sure my clothes wouldn't become part of the implement as well. And. They stole them."

"That might have been a good precaution. Even if it backfired. How did they get inside? They usually stay away from definitively human places, if there are a lot of them entering buildings it might matter."

"I wasn't in a building, wouldn't do that in my place, I was in a secluded area in a park."

"Well, at least it's not February. Doing that outdoors sounds like a terrible idea to me but only for normal reasons.

You at least got away safe from the goblins?"

"I kinda got a couple of them to help me recover my clothes but didn't phrase that well enough to actually manage to... get much more than that."

"Goblins are...they tend to think they exist solely to harass humans, and I'm not inclined to disagree."

"Well, that's... not unthinkable, given how terrible this magic system is."

"They're definitely contributors. Not a long-term problem, believe it or not, but in the present they do go around assaulting people and playing idiotic destructive pranks."

"That sounds like a terribly annoying ambition for them but this is like saying a calculator's ambition to output the results of calculations is uncreative. They probably think we care about all the wrong stuff, too."

"I suspect they find us incomprehensible, more than wrong. Could be either."

"Anyway," he sighs, "now I'm a practitioner, and I have an implement, I suppose. Any clues on next steps? I know how to use Bob to glamour, but..."

"It's...probably a bad idea for me to suggest targets for the seal plan.
I'd recommend using the summonings book to get familiarity with the field—I can help if you don't want to do it alone the first time—and then collecting minions. You don't have to start asking for unprecedented promises until you feel ready for it."

"Fair enough. Why would it be a bad idea for you to suggest targets?"