"I'm pretty sure if I do that I'll just wind up -" She conjures a candle; the rain doesn't hit it, either. It catches fire. "Do sorcery the usual way."

"I don't think so. Yours seems to be a skill. If I don't do any magic for, oh, two days, I'll wake up and I won't be any better at it than some random person who only rescues burned food and cleans their gutters with magic and nothing else. Not even specialist-grade."

"I was thinking of that as part of your world's strange magical capacity issues, but if it isn't a skill then it can't be the same. Where I'm from, only a magician can clean a gutter with magic. Though they usually have better things to do, of course."

"Here it's momentum. You gather momentum and you can do more and bigger things; you can channel that into a specialty, like healing or architecture, or you can go for sorcery. The official cutoff point around here for whether you're a sorcerer or not is flight, although if you don't do anything but fly you lose your general momentum and turn into a flight specialist. So you could fool someone into thinking you're a sorcerer but then they'll think you can do anything you want."

"I am a magician. I am professionally able to do whatever I want; people thinking it's a bit more literal than usual isn't a problem."

"What do you mean, professionally able to do whatever you want?"

"Unsolvable problems, impossible tasks, that sort of thing. Nobody expects magicians to be truly infinitely powerful, but it's bad for business to be unable to do things. So my team and I...do them."

"Please remember I'm coming from a background of sorcerers being it in the magic department, and given enough momentum we can effectively do whatever we want."

"Ah. Magicians can do effectively anything, but few individual ones can do everything. The things people hire magicians for aren't necessarily directly using magic; it's more problems like turning an army around, or dethroning an aristocracy of vampire cows, or convincing two politicians to hold a halfway fair election. As I said, impossible."

"...Why go to magicians for problems having nothing to do with magic?" (Kithabel causes a dramatic thunderclap overhead for effect.)

"They wouldn't want to waste a sorceress's time with something that didn't involve magic. I'd lose momentum. I need to be on the ball if I want to be able to resurrect the dead before I'm sixty."

"I don't know exactly how old everyone is, but decent momentum lets us live indefinitely."

"That's definitely not normal, or there'd be a lot more magicians everywhere else. Why is anyone here not a sorcerer?"

"Because sorcerers can't do a whole lot besides be a sorcerer. Slip up and you have to start over."

"...Interesting career switch."

"Oh yes. I've wanted to be a sorceress since I was a little girl. I dropped out of school to keep up better. I'm very young to be able to fly already."

"Flying requires a fair amount of momentum, and you can't get there gradually because if you fail at it during an intermediate step you plummet to the ground and possibly die, so it's considered the cutoff for who's a sorcerer proper versus who just does more magic than most people. I think in some places they use the ability to breathe water as their cutoff."

"There's really no way to practice it gradually? You could, I don't know, learn to turn floors into soft landing spaces or something. At least if you wanted people to think you were a sorceress before you actually were, but there is no way people don't want that."

"I'm not sure why someone would want that. Anyway, if you're not already, actually, sorcerer-grade, it's pretty hard to get anything done while falling out of the sky."