"A potentially interesting and valuable experiment."

"Castle's magic is themed around that game Tea had you playing, only with the actual pieces involved."

"Interesting. I look forward to learning about mortal magic."

"Moooost of it is a mess."

"In what way?"

"Well, the chess magic is something Castle invented. Because you can just do that. If you're willing to risk many horrible side effects, but from the looks of things thousands of people who have incompatible aesthetics and philosophies and hobbies and languages and so on have all done it without much regard for prior art."

"I am going to be either immensely fascinated or immensely frustrated," he predicts. "Likely both."

"One of the possible side effects is becoming addicted to the magic. Castle is going to try to find someone who is already addicted to teach to make fairylights to see if this condition affects one's dispositions towards sorcery too, else I don't dare actually try any."

"Yes, that would no doubt be very inconvenient. But is it a side effect only of practicing, or is learning the theory also dangerous?"

"Just practicing. I have read a lot of books."

"I would also like to read those books."

"Then you should join us the next time we go to the library with the relevant contents. There's another library but it doesn't have anything about magic in it, just stuff about mortals. Also interesting; not so practical."

"The information about magic may not turn out to be especially practical either if the risk of addiction is too high for either of us to use it."

"But Castle is already a practitioner, and can find more. Dividing the theory work can't hurt if we can get sufficiently up to speed."

"Perhaps. I don't know enough about the system or systems to know how well that would work."

"Well, I'm not sure either, but it's more likely to be useful than learning about various excuses mortals have come up with to kill each other or the nature of popular mortal religions."

"I am also curious about how they solve the problems caused by lack of wings."

"Stairs, like the ones into the crypt. And vehicles that roll very fast."

"Why the division between the library with magic and the library without?"

"Magic isn't common knowledge to mortals for some reason. One library is maintained by someone who knows about it and the other is not."

"Now that is fascinating, because it implies that the most widespread solutions to the problems of winglessness must be nonmagical in nature."

"Yes. I know how stairs work but I do not understand the underlying principles of the vehicles. They have flying vehicles, too, which go faster than any fairy I've ever heard of."

"Nonmagical flying vehicles faster than any fairy? Now that sounds like a potentially practical avenue of investigation. Unless those are addictive as well."

"I don't think so. But they don't fly them around everywhere so there must be some drawback. Let's ask Tea." She opens the crypt door.

"What are we asking Tea?"