"Still haven't really thought of anything. If your weird mortal magic were better I'd probably start entertaining thoughts of taking on Queenscourt but just blobby lights aren't going to do it."

"I'm pretty sure it's actually not magic – people have done tests on it and things, as much as it allows, but I haven't exactly kept up to date on research into it." He frowns a bit. "Are you sure you can't do it? Because, like, it seems unlikely that people would have just never tried and actually they can do it, but it seems really unlikely that people can't do it anyway."

"I can do fairylights. They're different, like I showed you."

"… How does that work? I mean, you said it'd take three weeks to learn or whatever, but is it a gesture or is it just intending for it to happen, or what?"

"It's a matter of knowing enough of the right things about the environment in which you're working. There's no gesturing."

"Then you just… want something to happen and it does?"

"...it's more complicated than that, you still have to know how to shape the result. But yeah mostly."

"Is it like moving a bit of your body physically, or is it like focusing on the right concept, or is it like just wanting a thing really strongly, or…?"

"...more like focusing on the right concept."

"Lumen's more like moving a body part. Except it has a weird sense. It's definitely, uh, got a proprioception thing." He shakes his head. "Still seems weird that you can't do it. It's in my head as a Thing That People Can Do, and you're a person, so." He shrugs.

"Well, I guess it's just a thing mortals or your world's mortals or something can do."

"Didn't see anyone doing it back there, I don't think, so apparently just a thing my world's mortals can do. That one, everyone was kinda like hybrids of the three species I'm used to. Made less vibrant. Or stripey, not that I'd see that. It's weird."

"Huh. So there's at least two mortal worlds, yours can't be gated to - I wonder how you got here."

"I was looking at a lake," he says. "It wasn't like that gate, at least, I just… was looking at a lake, it looked wrong, and then I felt off-balance and I was looking at Yellow's lake instead, and I don't– actually know which components of that were necessary for it."

"So it might be some phenomenon native to your world, but you've never heard of it?"

"Yeah," he says, shrugging. "But I'm– I was pretty sure my world didn't have magic, so."

"How is your blobby light not magic?"

"Because we don't treat it as magic, because magic is– it comes with the default idea of 'fictional', and since lumen isn't fictional, it's therefore not magic? I mean, people would probably look at sorcery and go 'well it does things and despite the fact it looks a lot like our idea of magic, it's real and therefore not magical'. I think? The word, 'magic', is usually used for things of a– certain genre that aren't real."

"Oh. Here magic is about causing things not to obey the laws of physics. Some magic happens on its own, some of it's kind magic, and some of it's sorcery. The laws of physics don't seem to obviously accommodate fairylight-like blobs under the control of a certain sort of mortal."

"I mean, the laws of physics are developed by– looking at what can be done, right, what is, and then forming hypotheses to be tested, theories that predict things and checking if they predict them accurately, going with the one that predicts it accurately and allows you to make other predictions? So, if people can do lumen, that gets involved in the laws of physics, and if you start off with people unable to do lumen, and you get laws for that, and then lumen appears and these laws don't explain it, they don't actually predict– all the physics accurately? They just predict a subset of things that can happen."

"Okay, but how do people do lumen? I have an idea of how I move my arm, what's involved in that - not a very good idea because I haven't studied it but I know there are steps and they probably all make physical sense."

"I haven't actually checked if it's the same for other people, since usually by the time you can talk – takes us like two years to start forming proper sentences, I think? – you can do it rather well, but I– uh, going through the steps individually, focus on a place I want it to appear, it's easier if I try to look at the point, and then I sort of… reach out without actually moving, like I'm just on the edge of moving, and I… aim for a thing to appear?"

He makes a small sphere in front of himself as demonstration, purple at first but then he turns it amber, and then he shrugs. "I don't think that's the best explanation, but it's difficult because it feels kind of intuitive to me? And there's a sort of– proprioceptiony feeling."

"Huh."

He shrugs. "It's weird," he says. "Some people can't do it much but it's usually if they've, I dunno, tried to blind people with it a few too many times, and even then it's not actually that they can't do it, it's just– weak."

"That's really weird, though."