Conference-goers collect greens.

Sadai builds infrastructure and meditates on magic until they have a time and place and then goes there.

Everyone is so happy to send greens.

"Hello," he greets them neutrally in English, his translation magic ensuring he's understandable by everyone in the room. "What all have you been told so far?"

There are aliens who can maybe do planets and who can do magic and who can teach magic!!

No, the aliens can totally do planets, it's a question of when not if. He can teach magic, though. He starts with the basics: five lifeforce aspects (breath, stamina, wakefulness, health, and youth), only the last two of which he actually has. They each have somewhat different domains and effects and while there's overlap it's usually better and more efficient to use an aspect for the thing it's better at.

Greens are so attentive.

Most magic takes the form of rituals, which he'll explain in a bit, and these rituals consume one or more of these aspects of the caster(s) as fuel. The aspects are meaningfully named: when you do breath magic, you get winded; stamina makes you need rest; wakefulness magic makes you sleepy; health magic makes you weaker and more susceptible to illness; youth magic makes you live less.

Breath's domain is smaller effects and automation, things that don't need direct attention; a few simple rituals that use breath are having a mental clock, cleaning a room, telling small objects apart based on certain parametres (loaded versus fair dice, salt versus sugar water...), detect a certain class of things (water, people, animals, metal...) within a few metres, or figuring out whether something's poisonous.

Stamina rituals are more about physical or energetic effects, and directly affecting the world: heating or chilling a place, telekinesis with sensory feedback, warding against physical damage, creating light, forcefields.

Wakefulness does mental and sensory magic: magic detection, telepathy, empathy (both active and passive), translation magic, mind-affecting illusions.

Health is very versatile and focuses on affecting the "nature" of things: reshaping matter, healing, shapeshifting, transmutation, affecting biology directly, complex physical illusions (i.e. which actually exist and occupy space while they're active).

Youth is the most powerful of them, and is most efficient at creating permanent—or, at least, extremely long-lasting—effects, as well as effects that are very resistant to change. Anti-magic wards and more general things to prevent change/decay are a couple of examples, but there are actually much fewer of those than of the other aspects' because youth isn't renewable.

Most interesting and complex magic, however, combines two or more of these. You can add breath to a stamina heating ritual in order to make sure the temperature automatically stabilises and stays pleasant, you can add youth to literally anything else to make it permanent. Any of these can also create magical artefacts, but most artefacts use at least a little bit of youth to become permanent or near enough as makes no difference.

It is also possible to learn to convert between lifeforce aspects, and to use any lifeforce aspect to create a ritual that does any particular thing—so there is a meaningful sense in which it is more efficient to use one aspect as opposed to another to generate a given effect. However, using an aspect for something also attaches some of its characteristics to that something: any rituals that use youth will be by default much, much harder to break or even modify and improve upon than rituals that don't even if they otherwise do the same thing.

Any questions so far?

Lots! Can they have examples of specific effects and how much of each kind of magic they'd use and conversion rates and how effect sizes scale? How do they know there are exactly five, how do these vary cross-species, how do these rituals work, how are they invented, how was this magic discovered, why is it that no one knew how to use it before but once the alien arrives he can teach them, why does their instructor only have two of these, can magic be cast jointly by multiple people, how do costs scale then, what's an example of a ritual that uses all lifeforce aspects, whether the longevity of effects is known or it's a matter of casting a spell and then waiting a hundred years to see if it dies...

He'll give them some more examples when he teaches them actual rituals, as well as show them how to feel for the conversion rates. Effect sizes scale... in a way that depends on something else he will talk about after this batch of questions. He'll explain how rituals work and are invented in more detail, too.

They know there are exactly five aspects because once you know how to it is possible to introspect on them and notice that there are only the five. The longevity of effects is not known but the next best thing to youth, health, has effects that go out after a few months at most while youth magic that was not actually broken seems to just last forever. There aren't any rituals that use all five aspects that he knows of, it would probably not be super efficient to do whatever it did like that as opposed to dividing it into more modular effects.

It seems to vary in the same way the relevant physical characteristics vary—that is why, in fact, he only has health and youth, he is extremely immortal and durable but doesn't need to breathe or sleep and is basically a living statue so the concept of 'stamina' doesn't really apply. But species who can hold their breath longer have more of the appropriate magical stat, species that have generally more energy to do stuff also have more stamina, and so on.

This magic comes from an alternate universe which sometimes snatches people from other universes and creates portals there and that's how people first started getting that magic. The reason they couldn't do magic before was that this magic only became available to them once he arrived on this world; it is contagious. It is possible to co-cast rituals, yes, and the total cost in lifeforce for a co-cast ritual is slightly greater than for a solo cast but not much.

They have even more questions!

He can answer most of the ones that don't involve directly doing magic, that part he's gonna talk about in a more ordered fashion instead of piecewise while answering questions.

Eventually they would like to move on to that and people with additional questions get shouted down.

Yeah he totally would've been a green if he could've chosen it.

So, he said that most magic takes the form of rituals. Which implies there's some sorts that don't. Those are gifts—intrinsic magic powers some people get, which are either always passively on or can be activated by an effort of will and spending the necessary amount of lifeforce. People can get gifts by meditating on their lifeforce in specific ways that are easier the more lifeforce of a given kind you have but not actually easy in any absolute scale, or, more commonly, by going through an extremely harrowing experience. Almost drowning is one of the most common ways of getting one.

A few examples of gifts are: detecting something, small-scale telekinesis, body temperature regulation (breath), larger-scale telekinesis, flight, super speed, energy generation (stamina), extra senses, telepathy, danger sense, lie detection (wakefulness), shapeshifting, controlling plants, animating objects (health), metamagic, and the ability to create permanent long-distance telepathic links (youth).

Can you reliably get gifts by meditating?

With sufficient amounts of lifeforce, yes; he found this out by dumping absurd quantities of it on people which seems to be enough. How much is necessary depends on the individual and the aspect and it still requires a lot of mental discipline: a week or two of almost uninterrupted guided meditation is enough to develop a breath gift, and the others are harder according to their hierarchy (youth is harder than health is harder than wakefulness is harder than stamina is harder than breath), so correspondingly require more time, lifeforce, and instruction to be developed effectively.

These people all wanna do magic.

He'll eventually teach them enough to get them all breath gifts but it is probably better to start with rituals. The best way to think of ritual sorcery is perhaps as a language: there are some basic actions, which can be thought of as words, and some rules about how to combine them, which can be thought of as grammar and syntax, in order to "tell" the magic what effect is desired. It's also like a language in that there is more than one set of actions and rules, which are called "schools of magic." They vary in what kinds of magic are easiest and/or most efficient, what basic concepts are available and what that sacrifices, but most schools of magic are flexible enough to be able to do anything any other school can. Not all—some sacrifice this flexibility to be very very efficient and effective at a restricted subset of magical effects. In order to perform even the most basic rituals one needs to have at least a rudimentary understanding of a school, so he's going to start with that and explain to them how to perform a very simple spell.

(He doesn't mention that he created this school very recently, or indeed that it is possible to create new schools of magic at all. After long enough they'll figure this out on their own and he doesn't want to make this any easier than that. He also very much doesn't mention he started teaching some reds this.)

He has such attentive students.

So this school of magic's focus is on symbolically sacrificing representations of the effect you want to achieve. Writing them on a piece of paper and tearing it, drawing them and setting them on fire, even recording them and then deleting the recording works. There are some more specific rules about what exactly to do and how to do it, and he's going to show them how to spend a little bit of breath to make a small marble float. He zips around the room and in a couple of seconds everyone has a marble and a piece of blue paper. They're supposed to write a certain thing in a circle and tear it to pieces while focusing on the effect they want.

They all do that.

Then they'll all find themselves looking at floaty marbles and feeling slightly winded and out of breath, kinda like they just ran for a while or held their breath underwater except in a weird way that's completely decoupled from stuff that usually comes with that like being tired.

They are so delighted. There is cheering.

And now that they know what that feels like he'll explain how to introspect on their lifeforce so they know approximately how much of each aspect they have and can pay attention to how much is spent on magic. They'll probably have about twice as much youth as a human because lifespans but he'll drop a few thousand years of it on them in the future, after planets.

Why after planets?