"Do everyone a favor and find one in a nice and uninhabited few dozen tiles before trying it?"

"Sure thing. Your world is very... neat."

"I'm getting that feeling. Compared to spheres for land and molten atoms for suns and so on."

"No, actually in that sense I'd say mine is neater. Other than the inexplicable personal magic, my world is very organised on a very low level. Yours is neat on a much higher level, what with tiles and stuff."

"Maybe you just don't know the neat, low-level rules this world has, if it does? I'll be the first to admit there are a lot of mysteries about how things work around here."

"Yeah. I have a hard time imagining what neat, low-level rules would produce tiles, though. Granted, I also have a hard time imagining how magic in my world emerges from physics and I'm actually pretty sure it doesn't."

"Something, somewhere... Is cheating."

"Yeah. I'd love to find it and be very annoyed at it and then show it how to properly design a universe."

"You'd rather have a properly designed universe than magic? Can't say I agree on that one, satisfying as it would be."

"I didn't say my properly designed universe wouldn't have magic, it would just be better-designed magic. And more utopic—this whole 'death' thing is pretty lame."

"Might as well add 'pain' and 'boredom' to that list. If you're going for maximum philosophical angst potential include 'evil'."

"I don't think I'd add pain and boredom, no. Well, maybe physical pain, but emotional pain seems... valuable? I... do not regret feeling sad that my mother died, I would prefer to be heartbroken when someone I love breaks up with me. And boredom's a very good incentive."

"And your thought process seems mostly human to me. Other kinds of people can have very strange to us thought processes and might ethically value different things. What about them?"

"Well if I were designing a universe I don't think I'd actually build in any, er, emotion limitations? Like that? I mean involuntary death's bad, I suppose if someone wants to be dead they can, and also I am not currently omnipotent nor do I see an avenue to become thus so I have not given much thought to what I'd actually do in such case."

"Aha. Nevermind then. What I was referencing, most merfolk don't really care if they die as long as their tribe doesn't, though usually dying is bad since then the group can do less work and has less skills."

"...weird, but okay, I guess."

His ship has by now fallen into a neat line with various other ships approaching Windvale. There is a flying platform with a woman wearing a very official-looking uniform in front of Nick, directing his ship's every slow move.

"You're not going to ask about how the magic works? I'm almost insulted, I made most of the ship myself."

"I figured learning from, like, a book would be more efficient and also that you might not want to waste your time teaching what's probably equivalent to pretty advanced engineering? But if you wanna talk about it I won't refuse to listen."

"I could lecture you on how to make a simple, useless wand as a demonstration exercise. But this would be a waste of both our time. Magic as I am referring to is anything that does something simple physical principles cannot explain and is not innate like Fair Folks' magic. At its core magic is creatively arranging the different principles. Long, long chains of them with confusing interactions in some cases, a lot of the time confusing refusals to interact properly since most of the pieces have irritating requirements that aren't entirely clear even with analysis. But when you get to the end of it all anything humans can make is just different words written with about twenty five thousand tiny letters. I already explained this, but there is exactly one 'letter' for every Fate that ever existed. They can die, you see, it's just rare."

"You 'say' the letters with certain physical actions which sometimes sound ridiculous on the face of it. For example to bind two things with a dog-tag, called that because one then 'follows' the other like a dog and its master, you place the 'master' directly on top of the 'dog' and then hitting them with something made of silver. One of the most popular ways to add 'remove thermal energy' requires snuffing out and destroying a candle. There's entire dictionaries full of these and how to chain them together."

"This... sounds very cheatable with an eidetic memory."

"Quite so. If there were magic that interacts with minds much at all, I'm sure memory amulets would be a hot item. There's a sort of intuition to it if you practice enough, but you get that with most things."

"So there are twenty five thousand basic actions, which you chain together in order to make magic things?"

"Twenty five thousand or so, yes. A lot of them are redundant to each other, or very niche, it's not a well-designed system since it gets added to one piece at a time by particularly stubborn individuals of different species."

"So you can invent redundant pieces of magic? They don't have to be all new?"

"Redundant in purpose, not redundant and identical in all detail. But yes."