The air is warm, humid and unpleasantly smoky. The sound of a waterfall can be heard nearby. She is in an alley between two tall, ornate stone buildings, and there is a lot more magic around than she is used to, none of it of a familiar type. Among the unfamiliar pieces of magic is a connection binding her to the only other person present in the alley; a man dressed all in blue, his face shaded by a cloak, who in addition to the magic which binds her to him has a second and equally unfamiliar sort of magic in a greater quantity.

He says something in an unfamiliar language and an irritated-sounding tone of voice. The magical connection tells her that it means "You aren't a geologist, are you?".

Wow.

This is so—so much magic—so much all of it what is it she's never seen so much and so different so nothing like anything—

What's this bit of magic connecting her to him? What's this magic surrounding him? ...what's this magic moving in his head—

—it's responding to her thoughts—

—he's reading her mind—

—no no no no nope nuh uh no reading of minds at all no sir her mind is completely opaque to anyone that is not her it is impossible to find her or anything about her without her explicit direct permission (in the form of a specific mental action embedded into the spell) this will last the next hour or so it'll work in such-and-such way done.

The link between Kaede and the telepath, which remains in place, tells her that the next thing he says means "stop that!", and that his not being able to sense her thoughts anymore is annoying and slightly scary.

"Um no thank you I'm happy with my brain staying mine."

The telepath takes a few steps back, closes his arms around himself, and is quiet for a few seconds. Then:

"You can see magic."

"...you caught that, did you."

"Yes. What else can you do?"

"I'm kinda still thrown by the mindreading."

"I'm a natural telepath. I'm really not used to interacting with people without knowing their thoughts, especially people as utterly unknown to me as you are. Not being able to see through your shield is more disconcerting than not being able to see would be. And I don't really see different minds as distinct from each other the way most people do; I'm not convinced you have very much more right to know about a thought than I do just because it happened in your head."

"Oh that's bullpoop, of course you do. Or are you saying I'm allowed to develop a mind-reading spell myself and see what's going on in that noggin' of yours?" she asks. Never mind that that's as far as anyone knows impossible.

He pauses for a bit to think, and leans against a wall.

"I suppose I would prefer you not to do that. And perhaps more to the point there are things I've forgotten so as to make sure other mind-readers wouldn't find them.

Although I suspect I did that because I distrusted those mind-readers' motives rather than out of mere desire for privacy. And I would probably mind you reading my mind less if I trusted you more.

In any case, I'm still not going to give up my telepathy for the sake of peoples' privacy. It would feel like giving up too much of who I am, and a huge part of how I live, and an incredibly useful tool besides. And I don't think I could stand not knowing so much of what was happening around me."

"I didn't say you ought to. Heavy conscience?"

She examines him with her other sense. She thinks if she spent long enough around him she could, in fact, design a spell to render his telepathy temporarily useless. And it's not unthinkable that she could do something permanent... But she doesn't know enough about the situation.

"Tit for tat, you tell me stuff and I tell you stuff, how's that sound?"

"Certainly. I am Jace Beleren, a mind mage and planeswalker. This is the city-plane of Ravnica. I was attempting to summon a Dominarian geologist, but someone over that way" (he indicates a direction) "cast a spell that made mine malfunction. Who are you, what can you do, and what do you want?"

"I'm Kaede, I can do metamagic, I want to figure out what's going on in more detail. I'm in another universe?"

"Yes. This is Ravnica, a world covered entirely by city. One-thousand-and-twenty-three years ago, ten organizations known as the Guilds agreed to share power over Ravnica. They cast a powerful spell called the Guildpact to bind the organizations to their parts of the agreement and bind those of us who were not members of a Guild to nonetheless be subservient to them. Twenty-five years ago, the magical part of the Guildpact finally ceased to function. Since then there have been rebellions against the guilds and wars between them, and the guilds have finally begun to change and adapt rather than stagnating in the complacency of unchallengeable supremacy. But for the most part, the guilds still rule the world and fulfill their ancient functions in it.

One of the Guilds is the Izzet Leage, an organization of engineers, technicians and physicists of which the dragon Niv Mizzet is founder and permanent head. They maintain, or used to maintain, much of the city's infrastructure. Since the Guildpact expired, however, It has increasingly seemed as though Mizzet is becoming less concerned with securing the guild's position or maintaining vital infrastructure than with pursuing some grand secret project. So much so that he has redirected much of the guild's resources towards mysterious ends while dams burst and streets flood. So I've been trying to find out what that project could be.

The project seems to involve mapping Ravnica's leylines and the way they interact with the remains of the Guildpact. So I thought a leyline geologist from a world which had never had a Guildpact might be able to provide a useful perspective. But when I tried to summon one, someone else nearby cast a spell to make spells go wrong, and as a result my spell apparently summoned a metamancer instead."

"Multiple universes are a normal feature? What are leylines and what's a leyline geologist? How long is a year here? How does your magic work?"

Jace studies Kaede. Curiously rather than suspiciously, now.

"We who can bridge universes naturally are so rare, and the magic to bridge them technologically so difficult, that many worlds think themselves alone. Worlds with magic so strange as yours, such that someone could see mana naturally yet not know of leylines, are much rarer.

All, or perhaps almost all, magic is ultimately powered by mana. Mana flows through all earth and through all living things, but principally along certain channels in the ground we call 'leylines'; most magic throughout the multiverse is powered by mana from leylines. A leyline geologist studies the ways in which leylines and the physical structures of the earth interact with each other, which is useful in helping those who cannot see leylines find them. A year here lasts thee hundred and seventy days.

I'm not sure which aspects of my magic are and are not familiar to you. My way of thinking and of seeing the world aligns with blue mana. This means more or less that I yearn to understand things and act on that desire, that I think before I act and act on those thoughts, that I try not to allow emotion cloud those thoughts, that I prefer progress to blind traditionalism, and various other things along that vein. You are, I think, similarly attuned.

This attunement causes the places where blue mana pools to call to me," he gestures in the direction of the sound of running water "and when I find them I establish a spiritual connection to the places they flow through, and find where their mana pools. This allows me to, through a combination of words, gestures and thoughts, tap that mana and channel it into spells. For example..."

and he describes how he would cast a simple spell for thinking more quickly and calmly and why it would work.

"Can you show me this spell? And that—the way you just described it—that's very much not how magic works in my world. At all. Only people are sources of magic, and all magic in the world—with maybe one exception—comes from people. And it's not really personality-based, it's as far as anyone can tell completely random."

"Hmm.

In that case it sounds like you're from a very strange world indeed. And i'm afraid... [sigh]

For the time being, I would rather keep what little mana was left in my reserves after summoning you in case I need it for self defense. It will take several hours for my mana pools to be sufficiently restored that I would be comfortable casting another spell."

"...you get mana from places, right?"

"Yes."

"Can you show me one such place?"

Jace turns and gestures for Kaede to follow.

He leads her through the alley towards the sound of the waterfall. The alley ends at a corner, and around the corner it leads onto a walkway overlooking a wide river. Along the sides of the river, and on islands along it, are tall, domed buildings decorated with beautiful and elaborate carvings. From between the buildings flow countless rushing waterfalls. Joining the sides of the river to each other and to the islands are numerous stone bridges. A bright current of mana flows into the river from a waterfall a way upstream and along it out of sight, and faint streams run into and out of it from the streets and from other waterfalls. Jace gestures to the nearest island-building. If Kaede looks carefully, she will see that mana is slowly accumulating along its shore.

"That island normally has a lot more mana around it. I used it on the spell that ended up summoning you. If you want to see somewhere which currently has its mana, it will be a longer walk."

She shakes her head. "No, I just want to..." Understand this mana is what she just wants to. It's regenerating, so she doesn't need to worry about breaking it. Is there any obvious way for her to accelerate the recharge rate?

Not easily. If she had a source of mana she could put some into it. And living things help recharge the land's mana, but it would take a lot of them to cause a noticeable increase.

Some of the people in the streets do not appear to be human; there are bald blue-skinned people, tiny green people with enormous noses, and a creature with a single enormous eye. Many of them have magical effects on them, of various kinds. A lot more have magic than did in Galatea.

And magic of such different types, none of them is recognisable.

But okay, let's focus more on this mana place. What exactly is generating this mana? Can she coax it into producing more? Are there other untapped sources nearby, or ways to boost production?

The earth and water produce mana, as do all the living things in and on them; people, animals, water, and a few houseplants. She could maybe coax the existing landscape to produce mana more quickly, but it would be complicated and require continuous effort. Making more life in the area would certainly speed up mana production if she could do that. She could probably gather some of the diffuse mana distributed around the landscape, and there are other similar mana sources along the leyline, some depleted and some not (there one becomes depleted, its mana being pulled away into a spell), the nearest undepleted one around two kilometers away. There are also quite a few people with magic amulets for accessing other, distant mana reserves.

Further away, there is a leyline of another sort of mana; energetic, hot and passionate where this mana is calm, cool and thoughtful. Deep under the ground there is another leyline, its mana proud and hungry and sickening.

Hmmmmmm okay what if she does the diffuse mana thing?

She now has mana. The people and animals in the street suddenly seem noticeably more tired. The mana is slowly dissipating, but slowly enough that she could definitely try casting Jace's spell before it does.

Jace looks at her in surprise.

Can she hold it all and keep it from dissipating? She'd very much like that.

"I might be able to figure out how to use this more efficiently," she adds casually.

"How?"

"I don't have vocabulary for it," she says mildly.

"Could you show me?"

She did build a voluntary exception to her mind opacity spell for a reason. She opens it up and—shows him.

"Interesting. I had assumed you had meant you could use the mana more efficiently, rather than the landscape itsself. I don't believe that can be done with the metamancy I'm familiar with- it seems the purview of green rather than of blue magic."

She shrugs and closes her mind again. "I also don't know the full extent of what I can actually do with my metamancy here because I haven't been around for long enough but the fact that it doesn't seem idiosyncratic is promising to my building knowledge and being able to generalise it."

"What sort of things could you do with your metamancy in your home plane? In the worlds I'm familiar with, magic for gathering raw mana more efficiently is not normally considered the same specialty as magic for manipulating existing spells and magical constructs.

For that matter, besides metamancy, what other sorts of magic do people have in your home plane?"

Instead of explaining with words she opens her mind just enough to let him get the concepts:

Expression, the effect of trying and succeeding to do magic, it's idiosyncratic and causes different effects depending on the kind of mage a person is.

Mana, the fuel every form of magic uses, personal and (normally) impossible to transfer, built up from birth.

Arcanism, (permanently, but personally) binding (in one sitting, you can't stop in the middle and continue later) magical effects (known as spells) to actions and words and symbols (collectively known as a spell's incantation) in order to project them or write them down so other people can do it. Expression tends to cause an unfortunate effect to be attached to an unfortunate incantation. Mana has no hard cap and starts charging up from birth, whenever the arcanist performs one of their spells' incantation while having enough mana the spell will be cast. Typically concerned with limited-duration or instantaneous effects, can also create scrolls that allow other people a single use of a spell.

Enchantment, (permanently) attaching (in one sitting, you can't stop in the middle and continue later) magical effects to inanimate objects (known as artefacts). Expressions tends to cause a random inanimate object nearby to become an artefact. Mana has no hard cap and starts charging up from birth; artefact creation costs mana, and every artefact has its own mana charge which runs down as it's used or as time passes and needs to be periodically recharged. Artefacts are automatically more durable than their mundane counterparts, and can store information or mana (which can then be drawn by other enchanters).

Elementalism, being able to apply magical effects (known as blessings) to oneself, elementalists have a (possibly infinite) list of magical effects to pick from, and what counts as a magical effect depends on the elementalist's specific mental architecture. Expression doesn't tend to have any extraneous side effects. Mana has a hard cap per blessing, all blessings start up charged with exactly the same amount of mana (although this is not known for sure by non-metamancers), mana only recharges while an elementalist has a blessing active but not being used (elementalists always have one and exactly one blessing active from when they Express and can only switch active blessings while not using them). Blessings are typically safe for their user (a blessing to go through solid objects for instance does not allow its user to suffocate while using it) unless the user decides to be reckless about it (stop flying while very high up).

Metamancy, being able to see and manipulate but not produce all magic. They can transfer and convert mana between people, they can unbind incantations from spells, they can turn an artefact into a mundane object, they can allow elementalists to recharge mana while not having a blessing active, they can nonconsensually steal mana from other mages and from artefacts, they can allow arcanists and enchanters to take breaks while developing spells/artefacts, they can use any mana they have stored to perform the effects of any of the other sorts of mages, they can lock up or steal a person's blessing. Expression has no external effects if no other mages are around, and accidental use of a mage's magic if they are. Universally reviled and considered sinful and tainted and evil.

A very small share of people have magic at all, and out of them not everyone manages to Express their magic (due to not finding the idiosyncratic mental action to do it), and out of those who do only a tiny fraction are metamancers.

"Fascinating. If you're telling the truth, your world must be the most magically abnormal one I have ever heard of. Can you use blue mana the way you would mana from your own world, for example to charge a blessing?"

Well—can she?

She can.

"Wow. I haven't seen mana anything like that before. Is that elementalist mana?"

He raises his hand, and the mana flows from Kaede into him through the bond between them.

No the heck it doesn't it's hers.

Indeed it is. Jace sighs.

"And can you convert elementalist mana back into blue mana? What about other colors of mana? There isn't much free mana that isn't blue around here, but..."

He points at woman with wings "...she's flying with a black-and-white aura, and..."

He points at one of the small, pointy-nosed green people "...she was summoned using red magic, if that helps."

A moment then—" Yep. I wonder if I can turn it into some form of mana I haven't seen yet—green?"

White mana feels bright, clean, rigid, and dutiful. It demands that she use it for good, and not immorally. It doesn't have a clear idea of what that means, but would like to enforce rules and judgements, especially those of her society. Using metamancy on it is a little harder than using metamancy on blue mana, but she can turn it blue again.

Her attempts to turn the mana green are unsuccessful.

...no, surely she can do it. She's seen mana of all the other colours, there should be some way to find whatever's missing—

If she keeps looking she might find traces of green mana in the landscape, or a person a few streets away who was summoned with it.

Green mana feels vibrant, primal, physical, and serene.

Ugghhhh she wanted to figure it out without lookinnggggg pout.

Fine. "Are there only these five colours?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"The colours are balanced against each other- each has two associated and two opposed colours. According to our best theories, a sixth colour would also need to have two associated and two opposed colours. Since association and opposition are symmetrical relationships, that would only be possible if there were not one but five unknown colors, independent of the ones we know of. And so far as we've found, the five colors and their various combinations encompass all conceptual space. There is such a thing as colorless mana, but it's simply conceptually neutral whereas each color of mana is conceptually aligned. Of course, our theories wouldn't have predicted elementalist, enchantment, or arcanist mana, so our theories are clearly imperfect. And there are entities which seem to exist outside of the conceptual space we've been able to understand and around which colorless mana behaves almost as though it had a sixth color."

"Entities?"

Jace's responds after a pause, and in a sad tone.

"They're known as Eldrazi, and they eat worlds. When I encountered them, they had recently escaped imprisonment on the plane Zendikar and were in the process of consuming it. They reproduce rapidly, grow to enormous sizes, and are capable of considerable cunning and a diverse array of magical powers including mind control and a sort of magic resistance."

"They eat worlds? What the fuck."

"The multiverse contains great wonders but also terrible dangers. The Eldrazi are the worst I have encountered personally."

"Have they been stopped?"

"No."

"How does one stop them."

"Their capacity for countermagic is limited, and individual eldrazi can be destroyed. The main issues were the numbers of the lesser eldrazi, the size of the greater ones, and the way everything and everyone we bring against them will wither and disintegrate along with the plane."

"And is the thing where multiple universes existing is a secret stopping people from organising against them?"

"The problem is more the limitations and unpredictability of interworld travel. I've reported the awakening of the Eldrazi to the Boros Guild, who are responsible for responding to emergencies. But in the current political climate that might not be enough evidence to get them to dispatch one of their two planeswalkers even for reconnaissance. It would probably do more good to report it to the Academy of Tolaria West on Dominaria, whose headmaster has successfully dealt with multiversal threats before. But he's also notoriously unpredictable and dealt with one of those threats in part by destroying two planes and plunging another into an ice age, so I've been putting that off."

"...so he sounds like a problem at least as bad as these Eldrazi themselves."

"I don't think he would destroy planes except to deal with something comparably bad. If the things he did really were the only way to defeat the Phyrexians, as he claims, they were worth it; it's because of the Phyrexians that I say the Eldrazi are the worst danger I've encountered rather than the worst I know of. And last I heard he seemed to be enjoying retirement rather than plotting anything, although his plots have historically been convoluted enough that we may never know that for sure. But the Eldrazi are the sort of thing he might come out of retirement for, for good or for ill."

"...how bad are these Phyrexians, then?"

"Fortunately, so far as I know the Phyrexians aren't, anymore.

But Phyrexia was the domain of the wizard Yawgmoth, and he tried to shape it into his vision of an ideal world. That being a world where love and mercy were eliminated, where the weak utterly dominated by and subservient to the strong in their every thought, action and bodily process, and where the slightest failure was punished with immense suffering. He also sought to spread it across the multiverse, and came close to conquering Dominaria.

To be fair, he wasn't able to fully implement his vision even in the planes he created. It's possible that in practice the worlds he conquered wouldn't have become much worse than your typical totalitarian dictatorship apart from the unusual amounts of torture and rather absurd amounts of mutilation Yawgmoth was fond of. So it might have been an exaggeration to suggest that Phyrexia was worse than the Eldrazi."

"Well. At least there's only one world-consuming problem right now."

"Only one I know of. I've only been to nine planes myself and the multiverse isn't even known to be finite."

Nod. "Why is interworld travel unpredictable?"

"Time passes differently in different worlds, and we can't reliably predict how and when time ratios will shift. And the landscape of the planes is constantly shifting and difficult to map, and the spaces between them are chaotic and confusing, and take precise timing and control to navigate properly, with failure potentially leaving you in some unfamiliar plane. There are artifacts which create stable interworld passages, but the technology to make and to reconfigure them was lost."

and then, with sudden enthusiasm;

"maybe you could change that?"

"—you know, I bet I could."

"The only planar portal currently on Ravnica is kept at Nivix, the capital of the Izzet League. They probably won't permit a non-member to experiment on it, but asking for permission could give me more opportunities to read their minds. We could try to get you past their security without that permission, but Izzet labs can be dangerous to navigate even with the help of the League. It would be safer to go to Dominaria and inquire after one of the portals there, but it would mean being away from Ravnica for an unpredictable length of time and possibly missing whatever the Izzet are planning."

"Why are you so interested in whatever the Izzet are planning and not in ending the world-eating monstrosities?"

"Because I at least mostly know how to keep myself safe from the Izzet, and because Ravnica, unlike Zendikar, is my home.

And because I know there are pieces of the puzzle I'm missing here, and that bothers me."

"The world-eating monstrosities are probably gonna come for Ravnica, too."

"Eventually, yes. If I'd thought I stood a chance against them I'd still be fighting them.

You might be useful against them, but they might be able to take control of you. We should probably sit down and figure out what you can do that would be useful. Setting up planar portals is obviously one thing you can do. You also seem to be able to collect mana without using a bond, which might let us bring a lot of mana against the Eldrazi at once. And there are other lost magics you might be able to replicate. Shall we go to my place so we can take notes?"

"...yeah, okay. But also I wanted to get you some mana to cast me a spell so I could see." And she transfers the mana she's collected.

Jace demonstrates the thought-quickening spell. He manipulates the mana using words and gestures rather than with will as a Galatean mage would.

And is that something she could do? Is it a property of Jace or of the mana or...?