"I mostly mentioned the weapons because Earth is stereotyped as the crazy-weapon-place," Temple with a shrug, "and I totally want to rediscover the art of waypoint creation if your uncle doesn't have it already. Like, name your price."

"We don't have good long distance transportation," Dawn says as an explanation. "Portals must have one end in Elsewhere, but the end you are not standing on lands randomly and you must try multiple times until you get somewhere acceptable."

"It hasn't been a high priority because Sanctuary has a pretty thorough waypoint network," Ari explains. "But Uncle probably knows where to start looking. His dream was always to eventually have all the creations of the Horadrim at our fingertips."

"I like the way your uncle thinks! And maybe we can reverse-engineer it with sorcery."

Annabeth swings by with sandwiches and refreshments.

"Have you observed anything else your kind of magic can do that ours can't? And vice-versa?" Louis interjects while Temple is taking a bite.

Ari takes a refreshment. "I mean, I haven't seen anyone here manipulate the elements, but that doesn't necessarily mean you can't. Same with animating golems and skeletons, or laying curses. But those are things I haven't seen anyone here do."

Control over wind, light and metal is demonstrated by various people.

"There might be some translation issues, but those are all sound like things we can do. I am sure the specific varies."

"Uh," Henry speaks up from where he was standing. "Ari mentioned that necromancy is a specific kind of magic."

"No resurrection," Ari hastens to add. "But you can bind arcane spirits to a physical form made of bone or clay, and they'll carry out tasks for you."

Various nods indicating that's not possible here. "We can do something where we take an animal mind and copy it into a puppet body. My brother and others like him can animate things by giving them very specific instructions on how to act. There is no recorded case of someone actually creating an animated person."

"Or creating people in general," Louis hastens to add, "do you have forms of teleportation besides waypoints? It's impossible to do with ritual sorcery and only rarely crops up as a gift. Generally, things in the realm of space and time manipulation usually are like that."

"Teleportation over distances of a few dozen yards is fairly easy, there's a number of ways to do it. The only known method for long-range transport is the Town Portal spell, which essentially creates a temporary waypoint at your location with enough power for two hops, one to an existing waypoint and one back."

"Oooh, the Town Portal spell sounds really convenient. And our teleportation has a similar limit. In general sorcery isn't really good at range." Temple offers and thinks. "Is magic good at predicting the future?"

"There are prophets, but the prophecies are vague at best, and you have to be born with the ability. Not particularly useful."

"I think those cover the major points of magical divergence," Louis says thoughtfully, "at least from our end."

"Should we move to magical testi- Dal-Mirdone?" Dawn starts saying before the Daliath raises a hand.

"Before you start that. It might be worth preliminary talk about where to set up base in the Elsewhere end?"

"I'd like it to be near here, given I do anticipate wanting to be near Gabe and Henry and the triplets. I'm not in tune with your politics, though, so I won't die on this hill if you've got better reasons for it being elsewhere."

"Why?" Louis asks.

"They're nice and I like them?"

"It's awfully close to the dead city." Dal-Mirdone says giving the triplets a flat look.

"As a first point of contact," Dawn muses her lips are twitching a bit upwards, "that's not entirely a bad feature. Not that I expect we won't be able to just close the portal in case something goes wrong with the other side. And if their waypoint network is that good it might solve the transportation problem altogether."

It takes this long for Louis to get it. He turns bright red and gives Gabe and Henry a look.

Gabe winks at him.

"What is this dead city, anyway? Is it something I can kill?"

"Not something to be killed, no. It's a catastrophically failed experiment," Dawn explains, "a group was trying to figure out a way to tap into the magic that creates maintains Elsewhere's environment and change it. The attempt failed, killed all the thirty seven researchers and their entire lifeforce fueled an effect that spreads like an infection, changing Elsewhere's forests into a rocky city that slowly drains everyone's lifeforce leaving the place uninhabitable. Our best solution is cutting off the bits of Elsewhere that have been infected by digging all the way down."

"Unpleasant. If we had a spare Worldstone, we could help you out; unfortunately, the bloody thing exploded twenty years ago. As it is, I'll just try not to trip into it."

"Please don't. I am sure your uncle ...and friends would miss you." She gives Dal-Mirdone a challenging look.

Ari nods. "They would. I wouldn't want to upset my friends."

"Does this mean we can move on the magic testing?" Temple asks like a kid asking for dessert.

"I'm game."

"Great!"

"I want to pre-discuss some details while all this testing is done," Dal-Mirdone says, "politics too specific to be worth explaining."

Felix steps forward. "If it's no trouble, I would like to observe that in case there's anything to contribute. Or that I should report my grandparents. The Milirevi Vaesteri."