"It'd free you up to pay more attention to the complicated things instead of giving people puppies."

"Yeah, but giving people puppies is fun, I like giving people puppies. I dunno. I'll think about it."

"Is your ability to think about this or other things constrained by what prayer you're holding onto or is that just a matter of what information you can look for and what actions you can take?"

"I can think about whatever I want and mostly look at whatever I want - reading history gets a little harder without a prayer to go on sometimes."

"So looking at the present is easier? Speaking of which, what senses are you using to get information?"

"Sight's the most convenient metaphor for most of it, but I can obviously hear too, and I 'see' plenty of things that aren't actually visible. And it's more all-one-thing for me than I think it is for most people. I mean, I'm just guessing here, but you have ears and eyes and noses and so on - I just have one me and lots of magic. It doesn't come in parts so much."

"So - at a guess - you can 'see' in complete darkness?"

"Yeah, no problem."

"And you can detect and determine the functions of even completely unfamiliar forms of magic."

"Yep! Didn't know I could do that until I got here and saw some, took me a bit to get up to speed on it, but it's easy enough now."

"What was the learning curve like?"

"Short. I figured out most things right when I saw them. But I missed a couple things about dragon magic until they came around in prayers - the dying babies thing and the old age thing - and I think if I saw something else like that now, I'd be able to catch that stuff faster."

"Like that within the scope of dragons, or if some other species cropped up with similar issues in a different kind of magic you'd spot it faster?"

"Yeah. Or just - if I saw a complicated magic thing like dragons are a complicated magic thing, I could figure out the parts without having something specifically call my attention to all of them."

"Is that an actual expansion in your ability or just - an update based on the information you've acquired about how complicatedly magical things can relevantly be?"

"It's not an expansion in my ability exactly, but it's a skill I've learned."

"...Explain?"

"Seeing magic I didn't make is something I could apparently always do, but there wasn't any magic I didn't make in my world, so I only knew how to figure out magic I made. And there's some figuring out to that, if it's something I made in a previous incarnation, but it's not on the same level as trying to figure out magic that was designed either by somebody else or not at all. It's sort of like... I don't know if this is a perfect analogy, but you're a dragon. Imagine growing up in a world where you're the only person who uses language. Then you come here, and there's people talking languages all over the place - you have the ability to use them, but there's still kind of an element of skill to it, when before the only person you could talk to was yourself?"

"I think I'd have socialization problems that went well beyond figuring out how to use language, if that happened, but point taken. I wonder if there's anything else you can already do but have never had affordances to check..."

"If there is, I'd love to find out."

"I'll let you know if I think of anything. Might matter what your world is like. No magic besides you? At all?"

"No magic besides me at all. Lots of fancy gadgets I had mostly nothing to do with inventing, all of which work without magic."

"Fancy gadgets? Like what, Erubian clockwork?"

"Like - you have communication crystals; the thing my world has that's like communication crystals is called a phone, and you can use any one of them to contact any other one if you know its number, and you can also take pictures or play music with it. And the thing my world has that's like picture crystals is called a camera and there's kinds that can record sight-and-sound the way music crystals record sound. And I did none of this, it was all humans - my world's only got humans - figuring out how to make cool stuff and then doing it."

"Only humans. Huh. And this is not magic, it's ultra-fancy clockwork?"