"Wheeee!"

He loops periodically for the duration of the flight, then lands outside a house in a sparse area.

A giggling Anlei hops off and hugs his shiny neck.

A very small bird flits out of a window and turns into a very small human. "Hello Aurin, who's this?"

"Hullo, Mial, this is Anlei, she's from another world and wants to bother wizards." He will continue to have a shiny neck until Anlei is done hugging it.

"Well, she's come to the right place! What do you want to bother wizards about?"

And now she is done hugging it. "I kind of wanna talk comparative magic systems but it'd be awkward to do it at the wizard school I was accidentally kidnapped to with the people who accidentally kidnapped me!"

"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."