"I am more than happy to fill in!"

Aurin ceases to have a shiny neck.

Anlei grins. "Cool."

"C'mon in," Mial says cheerfully. "Have you had breakfast? There's soup."

"Quick hotel stuff is all."

"Feel free to supplement that with soup, then!"

"Soup sounds great! Your house is cute."

"Thank you!"

Soup!

Soup!

"So what's your magic like?"

"There's two kinds. The kind everybody knows about, you can only do really small stuff but if you have a lot of time or a lot of people working together or both you can make magic artifacts that'll do things much more impressive than you could've managed directly - way back in the day there were healing fountains and amazing shit like that, nowadays mostly it's, like, lamps."

"And the kind not everybody knows about?"

"It gets a lot more impressive a lot faster than the normal kind, but it really doesn't like to hold still, if you're not paying attention it'll get loose and set something on fire instead of whatever you were trying to do with it."

"Interesting. Sounds inconvenient, unless you need a lot of things set on fire, I suppose."

"I did ask if she meant literally on fire, and she did."

"The fire is super literal! It's kind of a problem! I'm not surprised most people don't use it, it takes a certain type to go 'oh whoops I'm on fire, better try that again to see what I did wrong'."

"Sounds like a perfectly reasonable approach to me," says Mial. "How else are you going to learn? Anyway, I'm curious about the prerequisites - wizardry requires a channeling capacity, witchcraft doesn't seem to require anything, lights and sorcerers are born with their power, mages are born with their power but then need a specific kind of triggering event to activate..."

"You have so many kinds of magic. Normal magic is something anybody can do - anybody from my world, at least, I think you guys would've noticed if you had it here, although with this many magic systems floating around maybe not. There's no, like, different amounts for different people, or only some people being born with it, or anything, it's just there. The other kind's trickier to notice but I don't think it's actually that some people can't do it, just that most people never figure out how to try."

"...I apologize if this is a rude observation but when you talk about this other magic it kind of sounds like you're dancing around a sensitive subject..."

"...yeah. So, the power for normal magic doesn't, like, come from anywhere really, you just kinda have it and you can move it around and use it however you want. The power for the other magic comes from - if you're around somebody who's in pain, you can pick that up kind of the same way you'd pick up your normal-magic power, and it doesn't do anything to the person either way but now you have some power. I kind of expect people to be weirded out by where it comes from, so I was trying not to mention that part, but as you can see I'm not super good at that."

"...that is a pretty weird place to get magic from," he says, but he doesn't look at all upset.

"Huh. Like, the fire thing you could get around, have a fire mage or a dragon do it, but - yeah I brought you to the right place."

"Oh?"

Aurin gestures all-encompassingly at Mial.

"I'm a shren," he says, "which, among other things, means I have an alarmingly high pain tolerance. Also I'm exactly the sort of person you should bring your interestingly exploitable magic systems to. Aurin may have been referring to either or both of these qualities."