"I'd like to meet the Dwarves whenever it's convenient, I'd love to come to dinner if you can catch me up on the nature of local formality, and yes, I generally wear gold and green as sort of a theme of mine."

"I'm never sure if the times I visit the Dwarves are convenient for them, they tend to prefer to communicate that they were inconvenienced but are present anyway, and I'm starting to suspect that saying you weren't inconvenienced is like saying you don't work very hard. Unless you mean inconvenient for me? I really don't work very hard. I can ask whoever made this dress to make you more of them, and I'm not entirely sure what you mean by local formality."

"I meant both you and the Dwarves, but if Dwarves are not available in an uninconvenienced form then I suppose I can mean only you. I suspect it's not worth it to commission additional clothes for me; I travel a lot and prefer to travel in my armor, which is not designed to be worn over a skirt. And I mean that the more important an Asgardian dinner is the more likely it is to involve breaking dishes, getting incredibly drunk in toasting every noun that comes to mind, and casual brawling, which I find extremely unlikely to be the table manners expected at a formal dinner here."

"Yes, those sound different from our customs. Do you enjoy dinners like that? Here it is not typical to break dishes, but there is lots of singing and we do drink a lot. If you got into a fight with someone my father would be very distressed and might throw you out."

"I don't really, no. I will not break your dishes or start fights. I'm not a particularly gifted singer and won't know your songs; am I expected to? Also, I've been operating under the continued assumption that I'm not supposed to cast any spells that affect living things, here, which would include my anti-poison spell, which I tend to surreptitiously rely on if I'm expected to drink like a fish because I dislike being drunk. Is it impolite to drink sparingly instead?"

"I don't think so; no one will notice, probably. Likewise with the singing. An anti-poison spell prevents drunkenness? How is that?"

"Well, it's not treated like one, obviously, but alcohol is rather like a poison in the way it affects the system and the body obeys no cultural expectations. At least mine. Quendi seem to have all sorts of interesting physiological conveniences."

"We can't turn into birds, though," she says ruefully. "Did I interrupt you with the letters? I can return later."

"Well, most Asgardians can't turn into birds either. I could turn you into a bird if you wanted to try it and I weren't restricting my magic so. And no, I'm not at the point where I need hours on end to get anywhere useful, just early planning steps." She dismisses the symbols.

"Planning for?"

"A spell. I'm going to learn to teleport. Between realms, ultimately, although I'll probably have a version that works within one working before I get there."

"That sounds amazingly useful."

"Very. Swifts are fast fliers, and I can fly in my sleep, but it will simplify a lot of my bouncing around playing messenger bird, and be a tactical boon if I'm confronted with a Balrog or something."

She sits down. "I'd enjoy watching you, or listening to whatever is on your mind."

"If you'd like. I have no practice explaining this but it seems not unlikely that eventually I'll try to teach someone how I do sorcery." She resumes filling the air with symbols. "Some of these are magical symbols - representing an atomic concept of sorcery, two hundred and nine of them that were stamped into my brain when I touched the Tesseract as a child. Those are the ones you will still not be able to read even after I -" She applies Allspeak to the symbols - "suit my writing to my audience." The actual words resolve themselves into the local language. "I'm reminding myself what my existing spells are made of, and seeing what I can recycle for teleportation - not very much, but maybe some of the subcomponents of the parts that know how people are shaped - and trying to get an idea of what I need to write from scratch. I'll need an extremely solid conception of 'location' as a concrete concept, and one that works relative to objects in motion - I'm not sure if this realm does it, but most realms are enormous globes, constantly spinning and revolving around their suns. They feel still to people on them, but if I don't adopt their motion when I land on them, immediately, I'll go crashing into a wall at best."

She nods."Could you avoid that calculation with a relative teleportation spell? One that puts you a hundred feet from where you started?"

"Yes, and I might build that option in. But I'd have to be careful that I didn't guess wrong about what was exactly a hundred feet in a certain direction and wind up up to my ankles in earth or embedded in a tree."

She nods. "Ideally there'd be something that ensures, if there's an object at your exact destination, you land in the nearest clear space?"

"Yes. So I also have to rigorously define 'clear' - is someplace that is on fire 'clear'? Is underwater 'clear'? Someplace which doesn't have any arrows in it at the moment but did a moment ago and will a moment in the future? Do I need a full Loki-sized clear space if I am teleporting as a swift? - and maybe allow myself to remove that safety if I'd rather be in a location that was on fire than not." Notes appear in the air in a tidy branching structure as she mentions these concerns.

"If you have a destination in mind, how do you specify it? If not with relative distance?"

"Good question. I don't know yet. I could try to make it so I can land in a place I'm visualizing," a bulleted list sprouts into existence, "and get between, say, here and my home, but that won't take me to someplace I've never been and have only seen out-of-date pictures of, and I might want to go to such places. The spell needs to be smart enough to take me to a planet by name alone, match its speed, land me feet down and head up, keep me as safe as it can without failing when I'd rather it succeed, and maybe even fail informatively so I can tell the difference between 'the problem is there is no air on this planet' and 'the problem is this planet is on fire' so I know what protections to fetch. Maybe it should be able to find population centers, so I don't have to trial-and-error when my principal interest is the people of a realm and not the scenery. And I want to be able to take passengers, which is its own complication; and cargo, likewise."

"There are obviously simplifications to that, like taking everything within a ten foot sphere of you, but I take it that lessens the uses for combat?"

"It would. I'll probably go for will-targeting, sort of like my illusions; it would be easier to make it touch-targeted like the bird and healing but it'd mean I could only take small groups or amounts at a time."

"Does that mean you could also teleport lots of people away from you while you stayed?"

"If I do it right, yes. I could just drop the Enemy into a -" Hm. "Astronomical phenomenon that is extremely destructive."