"It's too hard."

Sigh. "Okay. Thank you for trying."

"Could you make it easier?"

"You can't mess with magic, we'll both die horribly."

"Why?"

"You shouldn't tweak any complicated machinery trying to make it easier or simpler or using less parts or whatever but if you do it to a wagon or something probably nothing will happen. If you do it to magic probably you will explode."

"People do stuff to wagons."

"Well, they shouldn't."

"And they don't explode."

"They won't usually, it's not, like, fixing wagons, it's, like, I don't know, if you tried changing the ball bearings around to see which materials took the most wear and tear, that'd be stupid and dangerous."

"...why?"

"The universe doesn't like if you - check its work."

"The universe doesn't like things."

"Yes."

"Rocks don't eat people."

"The rocks around here don't eat people but I'm pretty sure this is the same universe even if it's another plane, and every plane it's dangerous to do experiments."

"Plane?"

"There are a lot of different planes. It's possible to travel between them with magic which I don't have. It's possible to get sent between them accidentally. It could be that this place isn't on the Material Plane. I sort of figure you're just in a weird antimagic backwater but I don't know for sure. But the universe works the same way everywhere."

"There's magic, though."

"Different magic in different places, but that's not as strange to me, I don't know anything about what works where but I wouldn't expect it to work everywhere."

Segda chitters.

"My uncle died that way when he was a kid. He kept doing experiments."

"Stop telling me stories about dying."

"It's not a story. It happened. He has a memorial in the gardens and a fancy tomb in the royal temple."

"No dying stories."