"Pretty much! I think my hearing is a little better than it might have been, but it's not nearly as good as my mother's, I'm not sure if it's even technically outside human capacity."

"We could experiment."

"You're adorable. Like a kid who's been told his whole life that chocolate was poison and is now allowed to gorge himself harmlessly on the contents of a candy shop."

Milan giggles.

"Milan wants to know what technology can do, that's why we originally came to find you."

"Well, that's not an easy question, but..." she starts listing things. Light, more efficient ways of doing various things, ways of doing things that wouldn't necessarily be possible without magic...

After he's heard a bunch of this, it occurs to him to say, "...You don't have crystal balls or the ethernet, do you. No magic items."

"I mean, there's some enchanted stuff, but it's not terribly common. Enchanting's difficult."

"His magic system can do persistently magical objects and, I repeat, doesn't hurt."

Illia takes a stunned minute to process the implications.

"The mental effects and the fact that you can't do persistently magical objects are pretty much the two things about your magic system that don't make it sound like a trap deliberately created to lure me into lethal hubris."

"If you don't want to be lured into hubris you probably shouldn't hang out with my sister."

"I've been hanging out with her for a while now and I haven't died yet!"

"Well, hubris isn't lethal here."

"Evidently!"

"You can tell because I didn't die when I was, like, four."

"I survived my universe," says Milan. "Don't underestimate yourself."

"Your reaction to things that are terrible and likely to kill you is apparently to avoid them. Mine is to plot their downfall. When I was a little kid I didn't even have the subtlety required to realize that sometimes pretending to go along with terrible things until you can deal with them is better than actively denouncing them and punching them somewhere soft."

"Well, I guess we'll never know."

"One time she bit one of Papa's coworkers in the shin for being mean to his assistant."

"...I can imagine her biting the wrong person as a small child and ending up worse than dead," says Milan.

"Do I want to know?"

"When my father was about my age, he annoyed the wrong person, and he was cursed so that his pain never fades. He didn't know it was heritable until he had me."

"Are you okay?"