"It's not how I'd organize things, but I'm not a god. Yet."

"Well, I don't know how I'd put that letter in my name, but none of the options appeal."

"Hah. I'm all set - Kosorin becomes Khosorin. But I'm not going to do that."

"Anyway it would be weird if we set ourselves apart from non-gods. My sister's not going to be a regular Great Mage, let alone a god, unless we come up with some very clever solution, which is possible, but at any rate she'd probably still be a bit behind us."

"I don't plan on setting myself apart."

"Right. So no weird divine letters of any sort," she nods firmly.

A few minutes later, Illia's class finishes. She observes her sister and accompanying scarred cute boy loitering nearby, infers that they're waiting for her, and walks over. "Your hand's bleeding," she informs her sister in lieu of a greeting.

"Oh, right," she says, healing the leftover cuts. "Illia, this is Milan Kosorin, Milan, my sister Illia Zavier. Illia, Milan's from another world that squishes you if you poke your head up and has weird magic that doesn't hurt, none of which he learned because he couldn't without sticking his head up. I was teaching him our magic, and was letting him practice healing on me."

"The way your magic does healing is weirdly indirect," says Milan.

"What do you mean?"

"It doesn't know what 'healing' means! And is stubbornly resistant to being taught the concept!"

"I'm confused. Healing is not that hard, I think Odette would have mentioned if you just couldn't do it...?"

"I'm used to thinking of healing as a... fundamental magical operation? That's how it works in my world. But when I try it that way here, it doesn't work. I have to approach the problem indirectly, and erase or reverse injuries instead of just healing them."

"How d'you get healing as a fundamental magical operation? The way the human body works just sort of happened, it isn't written into the fabric of reality or anything."

"And yet, there's such a thing as 'healing energy' in my world, and it does as you'd expect from the name. It's not constrained to working only on the human body, either."

"That's weird. How does the healing energy know what to do?"

"A fascinating question which I have absolutely no hope of answering because if I'd tried to study the underlying principles of magic I would have literally died."

"Because this would have...gotten you noticed?"

"One of the underlying principles of - not magic, deeper than that, the universe itself - is that if you try to make a rigorous study of some natural phenomenon, with experimentation and analysis instead of practice and casual observation, the phenomenon you are trying to study will change its behaviour to spite you, often in a way that injures or kills you and anyone else who was unlucky enough to be nearby when you tempted fate. There's a patch of desert somewhere that doesn't have a consistent definition of down anymore because someone was paying too much attention to gravity."

"How do things exist in this universe."

"We aren't really well placed to find that out!"

She glances at him speculatively.

"Hmm?"

"I wonder if there's anything seriously different between your biology and ours."

"How would you check?"