He shrugs.

"I was gonna do the element thing, but after last year I kinda want to do healing.  Stuff like cancer mostly.  I'll probably ask around, see what I can do easily."

"Haven't you read the brochures? Pretty sure 'magic' and 'easily' don't go together."

He laughs.

"I meant, like, with the background I've already got, would one thing be easier than another thing."

"Yeah but in any case magic's just way too personal for that. You can read five thousand books about it and you will find out about five thousand different ways to do magery."

"Huh.  All right.  That's...huh.  I think I like that.  More room to do my own thing."

"Yeah, but it's really fiddly—haven't you been thinking about magic at all for the past year?"

"A little bit.  I had fire and I'd started working on air in the beginning, but I was kinda busy.  And I figured what I was doing was the same as what everyone else was doing?"

"It's probably not. What does magic feel like, to you?"

"It's, uh, sort of like..." he says, trying to figure out how best to put this.  "Like, I get this feeling that the entire world is made of clay or something, and all I have to do is reach out and poke it and it'll change. And, like, for some things, I can't poke them because I haven't worked with them very much or I might break something, but with, like, heat, it's really easy to squish that or stretch it out.  I figured this was how all mages did stuff because it feels...sort of like how I always expected magic to work, I guess.  You just reach in and..." he makes a squishing motion with his fingers, "...change it around."

"Yyyeah that's really not how it is for me."

"Oh yeah?  How is it for you?"

"It's... complicated to explain. The best metaphor I can find is like doing the splits? Except not really because when you do the splits it feels weird and straining until you stop doing them, whereas in my case it feels like I'm pushing and pulling and forcing until I reach the, uh, shape I want to reach, and then it settles and that feels like the new normal."

"Huh!" he says.  "That sounds...kinda uncomfortable, but I guess right for shapeshifting."

"And healing. I have no idea what it'll feel like when I learn to do that on other people."

"Yeah.  It'll be cool to find out!"

"It will! But I expect a few months still to be able to even heal papercuts on other people."

"Yeah.  Well, you can practice on me whenever."

"...I really can't."

"Well, I didn't mean, like, whenever-whenever, I meant, like, when you can do it and it's safe and stuff.  That kind of whenever."

"Yeah but by then it won't really be practice anymore, it'll be application."

He shrugs.  "All right."

"Magery in general's scary, biomagery has lots of potential for pretty horrifying duck-ups."

"...duck-ups?"

"Uh, yeah, I don't really swear."

Lewis's eyes widen, and then he laughs, hard.

"You...that was not something I expected you to say," he says.  "I've been thinking you were going to corrupt me."