"Well, no, not like that, but do we really know that there isn't some kind of--order of universes smushed against each other like planes in a three-dimensional space?"

"It's not necessarily impossible but it's at least not straightforward."

"I think mostly it seems nonstraightforward because it's impossible to really visualize a tesseract, but I'm not a scientist or a mathematician or anything."

"I don't think four dimensions would cut it. You'd need a lot."

"Can't even visualize a tesseract, I should have said."

"Yeah."

"It doesn't really matter, for most practical purposes. I'll leave it to the theoretical physicists."

"Do they know about Milliways?"

"Well, not yet, but I bet people are going to sit up and take notice when all of a sudden a family of assorted magicians turns up with the Lost Knowledge of the Ancients."

"I'm not sure yet how much I'll publicize once everything has gone down. I'm not sure how much will be necessarily public and how much I'll even have the option about."

"I don't think we're probably going to go public with this stuff all at once immediately but stuff's going to get out over time, if we want to get any use out of it."

"Makes sense."

"I wonder what-all we're going to get out of this. Well, you'll know at least as well as I will."

"What do you mean?"

"Because you're going to get sent home with a tablet of the stuff and you're an actual sorcerer?"

"Oh, you mean like - what is the content, not, how will it sociologically affect all the everything."

"Right. How it'll sociologically affect all the everything is something I'm plotting, not wondering."

"Tell me of your plots."

"I haven't gotten very far yet, to be honest; at this stage it's mostly just "dispense magical favors to people who need it and who are being actually helpful and conspicuously refrain from dispensing them to problematic people."

"Incentives," nods Bella. "Works best if you do give favors to reformed or at least improved problematic people, though."

"Smaller ones to start out with, though, so they have a harder time pretending to reform for a short time and then running cackling back to the dark side," Edie agrees.

"Yeah, but if they can't get anything by changing their ways..."

"Under the right circumstances I might be able to do a great deal of good even so if the magical favors given to helpful people mostly constituted leverage in and of themselves, but you're quite right."

"Leverage? Does that mean bribery?"

"No, I mean like magic that they could specifically use to do more good."