"Context?"

"We explained that Cam could make things he hadn't dreamed and things which stuck around indefinitely."

"The University is in fact a good place to go with an unprecedented magical discovery. In this context I recommend waiting for my brother to be able to vouch for you; whoever suggested that probably assumed that you had pre-existing standing in the academic community if you were actually making discoveries like that."

"All right."

"Now, I've been skimming these, and I have some suggestions--" and they can talk politics with insight and competence.

This person totally merits a promotion! And at the end of the day they can go meet her brother.

"Hello," he says, "who's this?"

"Maitimo, Cam, this is my twin brother Kayizane Kalen Zalech. Kayizane, these are Maitimo and Cam. They have unprecedented magic."

"We're from another star. Cam can make things permanently and they don't have to be things he's dreamed."

"Fascinating. How does it work?"

"It does not admit of much conceptual breakdown. Comes with being the species I am."

"Most things admit far more of a conceptual breakdown than people are willing to bother with, although I allow that in many cases the required tools are simply not available."

"Can't make persistently magical things, can't make anything smarter than a snail, can't make things in motion, range is something like the distance to your star from here, there's a volume per unit time limit that is very large."

"How large is 'very large'? How like the distance to the sun?"

"I don't actually know how far it is to your sun, the place I'm from is very far away and has two suns. About seven hundred thousand cubic this -" he gestures at about a meter cube, "in a second which is this long - one second."

"Hmm..." He takes a small notepad out of his sleeve and scribbles on it. "And the distance limit?"

"Honestly can't give you any more precision than I already did."

"Mm. Can you?" he asks Cam.

Cam looks it up, produces a meter of string - "That's a meter long, a thousand of it would be a kilometer, I can make things up to two hundred and eighty million kilometers away from me, technically slightly farther if I start within range and grow the object away from me."

"Thank you." He scribbles some more. "Can you expand on 'not smarter than a snail'?"

"If I make a snail, it will behave normally for a snail. If I make a rabbit, it will be alive, but it will not behave normally for a rabbit; it will have trouble moving around, reacting to stimuli in the way rabbit should, learning things, etcetera. If I make a human, same deal. This is usually summarized as 'can't make minds'."

"Do you have any idea why not?"

"I do not have any idea why not."

"Any other ostentatiously arbitrary features?"

"No antimatter - that being a sort of thing that violently mutually annihilates with any stuff that touches it - no vacuum, I need at least a little bit of an idea of what I'm making but it can be a kind of bird I've never heard of where I'm going off the name as your sister demonstrated earlier."