"--I am familiar with a god, whose existence I was not best pleased to confirm."

"...Just one? Which one?

She assumes one of the nasty ones, from that comment, but she doesn't know this guy particularly well and he is a vampire so it could be Pelor or something...

"If I say 'the Abrahamic one' I suspect you will not know what I mean. Um. Their name doesn't have any vowels?"

No vowels???

"...Oooh kaaay. That does not sound like any god I know of. Maybe it's a pseudonym. What are they the god of?"

"Everything, apparently."

"...everything? I guess maybe if this is their plane that makes a bit more sense, but wow. No...theme?"

"Uh. Is the god of this entire plane one of the nice ones or..."

"Better than most of their followers, from what I've gathered."

"Impeccably high standards for virtue or poor communication skills?"

"The latter, from what I've gathered."

"Could be worse, I suppose. What is your magic good at?"

"Physical effects more than metaphysical ones, though the latter is not beyond reach. Not expending a resource to perform seems to be the main advantage compared to the other kinds I've heard of now."

"Our most minor spells are free, or may as well be free, I'm not sure if anyone has spent all day casting cantrips to see if that uses up noticeable amounts of energy. It's probably free, energy costs aren't really continuous. What kinds of physical effects? What magnitudes? Uhm - earthquakes, weather, creating something from nothing, transmutation, teleportation, flight, deflecting projectiles, shapechanging - these are all things my style of magic can do, approximately in descending order of difficulty."

"Probably it can do earthquakes; I've never tried. The others are all possible, but not in the same order; shapeshifting is more difficult than teleportation."

"Shapeshifting is generally hard, but I was ordering those by "easiest thing that could count" and the easiest shapeshifting is mostly cosmetic, humanoid forms only, limited duration. Hm. I wonder if I unpack one of my spells and describe what it's doing you'll be able to contextualize it like one of your rituals. Or vice versa I suppose."

"That would be an interesting experiment."

"OK! So, this is a spell for making an object glow, it's a fairly simple example and doesn't involve interfacing with an existing enchantment like the circle scrambler..." and she proceeds to do her best to explain a light cantrip. "Simple example" is obviously a relative term, but a lot of her explanation is explaining terminology that probably generalizes to other spells.

He follows along, fascinated.

"...and that's about it. I don't think you'd be able to cast it without more explanation - probably just spell diagrams 101 and then a more standard diagram to prepare from but I think I covered everything you need to understand what it's doing and how it's doing it, any questions?"

He shakes his head. "It doesn't seem to be the same thing as one of my rituals at all, but it's fascinating."

"You could probably learn it, though it's generally accepted wisdom that devoting yourself to a single style of magic is more efficient than picking up two or more. It's not so much that they interfere with each other, just that one only has finite time and memory and attention and will be able to accomplish more through focused study of a single technique than through dabbling in many. For now. Would you care to explain one of your rituals?"

"I do not have finite time and memory and attention and would be happy to exchange thaumaturgical knowledge. Would you care to move this conversation to the library?"

"Gladly. Do you have the thing that people have when they are young that makes it easier to learn things? That's important, might be a limiting factor even if you have all the time in the world."

"I was turned at twenty-three and haven't aged since, physically or mentally."

She shoots him an envious glance before remembering that that's extremely dangerous.

"I will need to make sure my immortality includes that feature. I imagine that's the sort of metaphysical thing your magic is bad at?"

"I expect so. Vampirism being transmissible I haven't put as much effort into it as some things."