"No idea!" he says. "You sure you haven't been here before and conveniently forgotten your names?"

"No, maybe it is some kind of time travel weirdness?"

"Oh, maybe they are copies from an alternate evil universe! Do they have goatees?"

"I mean, if you're all set to have a 'Ternion agent' that gives like a million people superpowers but causes about a million to die, too, then– well, you're set to have that, hope it's good to know if you in fact are."

"Ternion agent?"

"Explain this better? When do these people die? And super-powers? You mean natural gifts?"

"A third of people who get the agent die, and of the two-thirds left over, half have superpowers and half are immune. Don't know what natural gifts are."

Itaruko sighs. "Anything like this?"

Woo, a small sphere of dark-blue lumen. Yay.

"Uh," Felix creates a ball of bright light on his finger tips, "this is a natural gift. We don't have anything that does what you described, people are just born with natural gifts."

"Mine's is telekinesis and Thor's is durability."

"Theirs were, uh, similar I think? Neither of our worlds have natural gifts, we don't actually have magic except – my lumen which is apparently magic-ish." He indicates the light.

"It looks very magical. Like a natural gift in fact, if it is not magic what would it be?"

He sighs. "To me, I expect that sounds sort of like if you had the ability to see and I was like 'whoa how can you recognize what things are from afar, there's nothing that could possibly do that', but to a slightly lesser extent because so far, sample size of four plus whatever the other yous knew, my world seems to be the only one that has it."

"I am not sure what to make of that example? To us, we just said it was magic, not that it was something, like, impossible or beyond scientific explanation."

Pause. "Ah. See, they're basically synonyms for me."

Fernando - who is still very naked - tilts his head. "I guess if your world doesn't have other kinds of magic your understanding of it would be limited. But magic, or maybe our magic, if it is different, is fully explainable by the laws of physics."

"Okay. Well. See, this is why I'm hesitant to call lumen 'magic', because magic implies 'not explainable by the laws of physics', and the laws of physics really should– you know, cover this sort of thing."

Martin was about to say something, but then he frowns consideringly and looks at Itaruko.

"Did you want to say anything?" Thor asks Martin.

"Just – people don't usually, in my experience, have that view on the laws of physics and magic."

Itaruko shrugs. "It's kind of the point of them, pretty sure?"

"I think people used to think like this? Before magic was better understood?" Felix shrugs, "We could actually check and see if it is magical or not."

"… Check and see if lumen is magical?" Pause. "Wait, I have no idea why magic would get its own separate set of rules, this would literally just be semantics and people have sort of already decided what the laws of physics cover." Longer pause. "Okay, no, wait, I think I get it."

Martin looks at him and raises an eyebrow.

"Public consensus," says Itaruko. "People don't think physics covers magic, general usage does it that way, same issue I have with other times people say magic isn't covered."