"Oh. Oh dear, I'm sorry."

"I mean, it's not like I knew them or anything. I had a perfectly serviceable foster mother, and I've had fifty-plus years to get over the whole affair."

"Okay. ...I have no idea how to tell by looking how old a human is. I suppose I was assuming by default that you were around my age but obviously that's silly."

"Well, I don't actually know how old you are, but most humans who look like me aren't fifty, so your guess was probably pretty reasonable. Unless you're, like, ten. Wizards live for hundreds of years; humans live about ninety, in ideal conditions. We wizards kind of get all the nice stuff, really."

"I'm seventeen. Young adult in, uh, pony years."

"Young adult in human years too! That's good, I was hoping you didn't have the same lifespan as horses from Earth. That'd just be weird and sad."

"They don't live long?"

"Uh. No, but they're not... people, like you are. Can't talk, no higher-level thought, they don't come in pastel colors. Sorry, should've clarified."

"...Okay. That's... creepy though."

"Eh, I guess. We've got animals that look about as much like us as Earth's ponies look like you, and they aren't people, so maybe I'm just used to it."

"There are a lot of species of people around here and some of them aren't ponies at all."

"Oh, sure, we've got that too. There's hundreds of species of fae, demons, undead... A lot of them are human-shaped, but not all. I guess if you only count things with souls as being people there's less of them, but that's kind of restrictive."

"I'm not sure what you mean by things with souls."

"Souls! It's like, uh, a little bundle of energy some species have that means they're not controlled by one specific purpose, like making shoes or drowning lost children. Without a soul, who you are matters less than what you are. Doesn't mean soulless species aren't people, though. And I'm pretty sure you have a soul, for what it's worth."

"I... don't feel like I'm controlled by one specific purpose, this I will admit, but I'm not sure that even non-person animals tend to be that."

"Well, things that aren't people don't generally need a soul not to be soulless. It's complicated. Souls are complicated."

"...so things in general don't either have or not have souls? Also there are some really borderline animals, on the personhood question."

"Yeah, it's- I'm not a metaphysicist. In my world, something's either a person or not a person, and if it's a person it either has or doesn't have a soul. There's not really much grey area. The idea of borderline-people was not in my magic theory education."

"It's mostly animals that spend a lot of time around ponies, and can't speak but seem to understand a whole lot of Equestrian."

"Interesting. Come to think of it we have had some animals like that, but they're definitely the exception rather than the rule, and I don't think anyone's checked them for souls."

"How do you check?"

"Easiest way is through a soulgaze - if a wizard looks into the eyes of someone with a soul for more than a couple of seconds, they simultaneously go on this very vague symbolic vision-questy thing through each other's souls and understand things about who the other is. But you can't, like, see their thoughts or something."

"That's very strange."

"Compared to the other things we've been weirded out by in this conversation, it's kind of small potatoes."

"I suppose."