The brown girl makes calming gestures and noises; the blonde one blinks at him, smiles, and then gets a book off her shelf to flip through.

He goes up to the edge of the ward and prods the invisible barrier cautiously, frowning at it as though he can somehow perceive its exact shape and location.

"Good, then you can tell me what I'm doing here."

"We summoned you!" says the browner one with the rounder ears. "It's just for a few degrees to show Nemaar, that's all."

"I... see," he says. "As it happens I would actually rather not go back where I just was when you're done with me."

"Why not?" asks Blonde And Pointy.

"Because I was in an empty building on a lifeless planet with no food, no water, and no other people in the universe as far as I could tell," he says. "Prospects seemed pretty grim."

"...Why?" asks Brown And Not Pointy.

"I was transported there mysteriously, unexpectedly, and suddenly by unknown forces."

...The blonde one giggles. Hard enough that she has to sit down.

"It's been that sort of a week," he says, grinning. "Anyway. I don't suppose you could let me stay in your nice universe which appears to contain multiple people? Or, alternately, send me back to my original universe?"

"I mean - well, that - oh dear," sighs the blonde, as her giggles subside. "Um, I have no idea if undoing the spell will send you back where you came from or to your original universe! I'd have to ask and if we ask we'll have to admit we were summoning sapient entities in the dorms."

"For which you will get in trouble?" he guesses.

"I wonder if I can at least answer the question about what undoing the spell would do," he says, sitting down on the floor and looking contemplative.

"Do you have some kind of analysis?" asks Blonde Girl.

"In a manner of speaking, I suppose. I have a form of magic that comes with a sensory or perceptual power unique to the individual user, and mine lets me understand functionality - systems, mechanisms, tools, that general class of thing."

"Oh. Well, if you can see the spell well enough to tell what it'll do when it's reversed then that's really handy," she says.

"But you can't do the reversal together. Can you."

"Lucky for me I didn't want to be back there anyway," he says. "Less lucky for you, admittedly."

"Sounds like a plan."

"I would really rather not be kept in this circle forever," he says. "It seems like it would be awkward and uncomfortable."

"I have absolutely no desire to see you expelled, if that counts for anything."

She is so extremely magic. And magic in very particular ways, specifically among others the way where she can do nearly arbitrary things to minds.

"Hello," she says. "I'm very sorry for the - partial convenience, reportedly. Do you mind if I check you over to see if it's safe to let you out of the circle?"

The extremely magic person thinks for a moment, doing a light, un-felt scan of his dispositions, and then steps forward and smudges the chalk line. The ward vanishes at once.

"Now," says Keo, "we set you up with the basic necessities. Korulen can take you shopping at your convenience, we can put you in an empty room and you can use the school cafeteria."

"Well, that's a significant step up from where I just was," he says, smiling. "Oh - I'm Miles, by the way."

"I'm Keo, that's my daughter Korulen, that's our student Saasnil."

"Pleased to meet you all."

"This way," Keo adds, leading him out of the room. "Incidentally, while you are currently stuck here, it's entirely possible for summons to be handled reversibly and safely, and people from your original world are probably not stuck there. Or we can just send them letters for you."

"...A letter would be... very helpful," he says, following. "If I'm lucky, my family hasn't yet received word that I'm missing, but it should be arriving any day now."

"Korulen will draw a sending circle for an inanimate object. Saasnil's getting you some paper and graphite." She steps into a little dead end of a room at the end of the hall. At least that's what it looks like visually. "In here."

Miles steps inside, examining the functionality of the little room with his Sense. "Convenient. What's it called?"

"A lift." She names a hallway and the lift proceeds.

"So, um... I hope this isn't an impolite question, but what's with all the mind magic?"

"I'm a unique green-group dragon," she says. "Standard green-groups are empaths; I have extra."

"I... see. My next question was going to be 'what's with all the rest', but I think 'dragon'... partially answers it."

"I'm shapeshifted," she explains as the lift comes to a halt. She leads him to an unoccupied room, like Saasnil and Korulen's. "Will this do?"

"Sure," he shrugs.

"All right. The lift will take you to the cafeteria if you say 'cafeteria'. Saasnil will have your letter-writing materials along in a moment, and whenever you want to obtain sheets and changes of clothes and the like, Korulen will handle that for you - she can summon your own things from home, if you'd rather do that than go shopping, but she will also take you shopping out of her own pocket if that's preferable."

"Very convenient, thank you," he says.

"And if you need me for anything, including to relay requests to the girls, you can just think my name loudly."

"...Also convenient," he acknowledges. "This is certainly the pleasantest arguable kidnapping I have ever experienced."

"Is it competing with much?" Keo wonders.

"An incident or two."

"Well, is there anything you can think of now that you'd rather not have to think at me from a distance to ask or mention?"

He shrugs. "Nothing springs to mind."

"Thanks," says Miles.

She puts it on one of the desks. There are also sticks of graphite, with the paper. "Um. Bye." She scurries away again.

Mother,

You aren't going to believe this one...

I appear to have been accidentally transported to a different universe. Twice. The second one is much nicer; it has people, and air. I am completely fine and getting along with the locals, but because of a quirk in the interdimensional transport system it's hard to say when I'll be back. Other people and objects can be freely transferred between worlds; it's just me who hit the one-in-a-million glitch.

Please reassure everyone who needs reassuring.

Love,
Miles

I have something now. Where will I find this sending circle?

Tell the lift to take you to the library, and on the left wall are several doors to workrooms; you want the third.

"Hi." He holds up his letter. "So how do I get this sent, exactly?"

"Just put it in the middle of the circle and then put your hand over there and concentrate on where you want it to land," Korulen says. "I'll do the spell."

Korulen casts a spell and the letter disappears.

"Thank you," he says. "So what is this a school of, exactly?"

"Wizardry," says Korulen. "But it's a kids' school so they also teach other stuff so we're well-rounded."

It has a lot of books in it.

So many books! Presumably some of them have things to say about his situation, unique though it is. Now if he can just find out which ones those are...

Well, he can read all the signs labeling the sections and all the titles, thanks to his translation spell. Does he want "Interworld Wizardry"?

He strongly suspects that he wants Interworld Wizardry!

It's not a very big section. There are books about summoning and sending, of objects and people, according to various criteria, with and without the use of foci.

He means to just do a brief overview of the subject, but between the unexpectedly interesting material and the unexpectedly interesting interaction between his Sense, his translation spell, and the written word, he loses track of time - and of the size of his growing book pile - pretty fast.

"Uh." He looks up from his current book. "Which one is that?"

"This one." The boy, who has red eyes, taps a book halfway down the stack.

Miles squints at it. "Right... no, I don't need it urgently, you may have it."

He takes it. "What are you researching, anyway?"

"Well, the problem I was originally trying to solve is how to end a co-cast summoning spell when neither caster has the CC to reverse it alone. But, uh." He looks ruefully at the stack. "Then I got distracted."

"Co-casting is a mess," says the boy. "I mean, you could try a break, but co-casting makes that harder than usual and it's already really difficult."

"It was a dumb stunt and they're lucky it turned out as well as it did," he says. "But, lacking anything much better to do, I figured I might as well read up on the local magic involved."

"Oh, you're an offworlder. Huh. Well, welcome to Elcenia, I guess."

"Thanks. It's an interesting place! Very, um, magical."

"Not so magical where you're from?"

"To argue that it's magical at all would be going out on a limb," he says.

"Really? Nothing? What's that like?"

"Oh, we get by. In the absence of magic, one develops highly sophisticated non-magical solutions to one's problems."

"Does one? I guess Erubia's supposed to be all right, but they use some magic, just not wizardry or witchcraft. Ryganaav's a hellhole."

"Completely without magic of any kind, we managed to leave our original planet and colonize a couple hundred more. And invent all sorts of marvellous things besides interplanetary conveyances."

"Wow. And now you want to go home but some people who didn't know what they were doing co-cast a summon too big for either of 'em. Rough deal."

"Actually it's even more bizarre than that, because before that happened, I was inexplicably shunted between worlds by a different mysterious force that didn't stick around to apologize afterward. Being stuck here with some hope of going home eventually is infinitely preferable to being stuck there on a planet devoid of food, water, people, and apart from the contents of a single building, air."

"...Wait, what? I mean, I assume you don't know the answer, but how?"

"Indeed I do not. It is a bizarre mystery. I've been kind of hoping that somebody somewhere had a theory that would explain spontaneous interworld travel, but so far no luck."

"Yeah, wizardry only works here, can't explain that with local theory."

"And there's no magic here that does interworld travel besides wizardry?"

"Nope. Unless you count a really limited form which is both a fringe theory and not what happened to you."

"Well, okay, you can't just drop a comment like that and expect me not to ask. Tell me more about this fringe theory."

"Ha. All right, there's a fringe theory that Elcenia's got a nearby, attached, other world whence conjured matter and shapeshifter alternate forms."

"Shapeshifters such as yourself? What's the evidence for or against?"

"Such as dragons, like me, yes, or vampires. It's really technical, do you really want to get into it...?"

"Yes."

"Shapeshifting and conjuration are instantaneous unlike anything that changes an existing object, if I left my other form dormant for a year it will have grown when I assume it again and would still have any objects tucked away with it. However, it's impossible to summon things from it and scrying just reveals that it is very dark wherever my dragon form is."

"Hmm," says Miles. "I wonder if I can help resolve this question. On my way through the dead universe I picked up a kind of magic that lets me analyze the functionality of things. Shapeshifting appears to have a functionality I can analyze."

"...Do go on."

"I don't actually recommend trying to go there and get some for yourself - it takes a long time, it's somewhat uncomfortable, you're not guaranteed results at the end of it, and if something goes wrong with your interworld transport you may end up stuck in a dead universe - but my Sense has been awfully handy so far. I can tell what spells are on me and what they do, I can tell roughly what sorts of magical capabilities a person has, that sort of thing."

"How long, how uncomfortable, and does it interfere with the the interworld transport or is that just a problem you and your mysterious method happened to run into?"

"Nine days local, stuck in a large stone building, unable to eat or drink or sleep, nothing to sit on, not much to do except communicate with the monument, and the monument is not enormously talkative. Then at the end you find out whether or not you passed the test. And I didn't detect anything in the monument that was set on keeping me there, but since I still don't know what sent me there in the first place, I'm not ruling out that there might be an entity with unknown goals and the ability to move people between worlds watching the taieli monument for unknown purposes."

"...You don't look like you recently spent nine days unable to eat or drink or sleep."

"The monument takes care of the physical requirements, but it doesn't take care of how boring it is to spend nine straight days awake in a large empty room with very few interesting features. I happened to be lucky enough to spend most of that time in some kind of weird monument-derived educational trance, but if it decides not to do that for you and you are anything like as easily bored as I am, you may regret going there."

"Oh, I get bored, but I think I could live with nine days upfront to extend the duration of my 'figuring out all the everything' project with some more everything."

"You're also not guaranteed to get the same analytical ability I did even if you get the magic - Senses are unique to the individual and you can't predict what you'll get in advance. I mean, if you still want to try it, I won't try to stop you, I'm just trying to ensure that you're accurately warned."

"I'm not going to run off and do it right now, but I'm strongly considering the possibility."

"Fair enough. Oh, and while you're there don't try to leave the building, there is no air out there and you might die."

"Noted."

"Anyway. How best to go about analyzing shapeshifting, I wonder?"

Kaylo takes a few steps back from the table and turns into a twenty-foot-long bejewelled-looking dragon.

"Huh," says Miles. "That was... that was something. It goes by so fast - can you do it again?"

"Sure." He does it back and forth and back again.

"You're definitely going somewhere," Miles concludes. "And coming back again in one piece. It's not, I don't know, creating you spontaneously from nothing every time. Just - swapping you out with the alternate model."

"Yes, that's the idea behind Lialenan theory."

"Well, Lialenan theory is on the right track then. I can't tell if conjured matter comes from the same place without an example, of course."

Kaylo reaches into his pocket, pulls out a little spout, twists it, and pours the resulting thin stream of water into his mouth.

"Pulled from somewhere, not created out of nothing," says Miles. "Huh. Does that mean your magic plain can't create things out of nothing, I wonder? Creating things out of nothing is one of the simplest elementary applications of taieli, the trouble comes when you want to create particular things with desired characteristics and not just undirected explosions."

Kaylo turns off the spout. "If conjuration doesn't do it, then probably not, although there might be a way to do it that we just haven't invented yet."

"Huh. Well, I guess it's only fair; taieli can't do interworld transport." He reflects on this statement for a second and then adds, "Yet."

"Yet as in you could graft this capability onto the system or as in you could learn how from within an already-available array of things doable therewith?"

"As in one of the other simplest elementary applications of taieli is copying and altering an existing thing, and spells definitely qualify as things for this purpose. I suspect if I put the work in, learning how interworld wizardry works and learning how to use rilte, I could make altered iltaiel copies of summoning or sending spells and use them to move between worlds."

"You almost certainly don't have a channeling capacity, which might interfere with anything beginning with a wizard spell as an ingredient," says Kaylo.

"I have an interworld transport spell on me right now," he points out.

"Yes, and it might decide to bite if you try to claim it for yourself," says Kaylo. "I'm not saying it will, I don't know what you're working with, but it's a risk factor I feel obliged to point out."

"...Bite me how?"

"It might try to go through more channel than you have, which is to say the zero channel that you have, and when spells try to go through channels without room for them the caster dies."

"Yeah, I've noticed that. I'm definitely going to avoid letting my results express themselves as more wizard spells. I'm not even sure that's possible to do on purpose, and I'm pretty confident it's possible to avoid."

"If you say so. I wish I could see the thing you're looking at but I'm not sure how to devise an analysis that piggybacks on a sense I can't conceptualize in the first place."

"Can't help you there. I couldn't begin to explain the actual impressions I get from this thing; the most I can do is articulate my conclusions."

"Maybe when you've had longer to get used to it you'll come to some vocabulary for it," suggests Kaylo.

"Maybe. I'm not at all sure. It's still pretty new."

"That word you used for the aspect of the magic, rilte, did you just learn a handful of those?"

"No, the monument taught me the whole language. For some reason. It's handy for thinking about taieli in, I'll give it that."

"Because I can speak that, too," says Kaylo, in that language. "If that helps any."

"Oh, huh," says Miles, likewise in Aiha. "Being a dragon must be really convenient."

"It is, much of the time," agrees Kaylo smugly.

"I wonder how bad of an idea it would be to... oh, wow, an even worse idea than I thought," says Miles. "Why does this world contain so many things that kill you immediately if you get them wrong?"

"I'm not sure what idea just turned out to be so terrible, so I can't really comment," remarks Kaylo.

"Try to turn into a dragon. You run on a resource of some kind, but you don't actually expend it in the ordinary course of operating your dragon-ness, which is damn lucky for you because if you lost more than a drop the result would be instant death," says Miles. "And if it was just a drop I can't quite tell what happens but it doesn't seem to be anything good. All things considered I think I will steer clear of trying to duplicate that state of affairs for myself."

"Oookay. I'll just... continue being a dragon, then."

"It seems to be working out for you!"

"I'm a fan. At what point in the process of thinking about turning into one did you observe the problem with the idea? And how?"

"I thought of the idea of trying, looked at the example dragon in front of me to see what sorts of things might happen if I got it wrong, and discovered that the mechanism of dragonhood has terrible disasters lying in wait for anybody who violates its standard assumptions. I could take years to get precise enough with rilte to be comfortable trying to copy that mechanism, and I wouldn't throw naharr at it for the yearly tax revenue of the Cetagandan Empire."

"Reasonable of you."

"I thought so, yeah."

"So if the results vary, what subset of possible taieli did you walk away with? Well. Get summoned away with."

"Results vary on the Sense, and there's some personal aptitude and preference in the equation, but in theory I'm capable of doing the same things with taieli as any other atailora with access to the same materials. Having a functionality Sense does make it a lot easier to do anything for which analyzing systems and mechanisms is a help, and I am personally pretty drawn to rilte and pretty unsettled by epru."