"Not quite, it takes a certain level of skill to do it if the corpse is too deteriorated, but if a person can do it all they should be able to figure out how to do it out of just the bones. But there were semi-reliable accounts of healers who could do it with just a person's name."

"We got back everyone within last thousand years who we know of with the thing, because of shenanigans. But there's also a lot of technique researchers who'd be really valuable who didn't get brought back in the course of shenanigans." Like his parents.

Phelix intuits there is something emotion beneath that comment, but doesn't know how to approach it. Instead, he asks. "Technique researches being relevant to your magic system?"

"They're the ones who develop new stuff, yeah."

"How does your magic system work?"

"Uhhhhh I'm not the best person to explain that. There's this energy? Inside everything. And it's really, like, clumped in people. And you can make it do stuff, and that does other stuff when it interacts with the world."

Frown. "That doesn't sound that different from ritual magic, does it involve a lot of chanting, burning herbs or writing in special inks?"

"Nope. No burning herbs, sometimes it helps to memorize a motion-set if you name a technique and call it out but you don't gotta, and inscribed techniques need special ink I think? But those're like a weird field almost no one uses."

"The things I mentioned are pretty standard ritual components. Even if just because the extra bit of potency they give." Reon thinks for a moment. "Besides the ritual magic, we have species magic which is restricted to about sixty-four powers. There are eight elements, there are eight categories based roughly on what the power is supposed to do, and eight original species associated with one element and one category, so each species has fifteen powers available."

"That's a lot. We pretty much just have chakra stuff."

"You just have humans?"

"Humans, spirits, and chakra-beings which I think are just the Tailed Beasts. Spirits don't live in this world, usually, they're from a kind of - parallel place?"

They pause for a long moment. "Huh, translation is getting weird. We have something that the translation wants to call Spirits, but they are not the souls of the dead. But as we mentioned, there is eight magical species, plus humans. Is it possible to go to the parallel place?"

"Spirits aren't souls of the dead here either. That's something else usually. They're - like, a really old tree, or a mountain's... Essence? Or a river. Or an umbrella that got super old and started kind of... Living. And you can't really get there super intentionally, humans have trouble getting there and spirits have trouble getting here. Spirits are in the Spirit World, the dead are in the Pure Lands, this is usually just called the Impure Lands if you're talking about the living and the Human World if you're talking about, well, humans."

"I see. People used to believe that our kind of spirits are the essence of things and places. But it would be more correct to say that they adopt a place and just stay there until disturbed."

Temperance has been talking to Phelix and getting translations. Finally they have a question.

Which Phelix translates. "Are you human? We have been assuming. But none of us are."

"I am. Most everyone you'll meet will be."

They nod. "We all happen to be part dragon. I am a quarter dragon, three quarters faen. Phelix is a quarter dragon, three quarters giant. And Temperance is half-half sea serpent and dragon."

"Neat! What're dragons like? Or faen, or giants, or sea serpents - "

"Dragons' base shape is that of a large reptile with six limbs including wings. Young adult ones are this size." He manifest a dragon shaped fog cloud, it's forty or so feet long with a forty feet wingspan, with the body is elephant sized. "But some dragons can shapeshift and their current form is hereditary, so in practice they can look like anything." He illustrates this by changing the dragon into various animals, finally settling into a humanoid shape. The same is true to a sea serpent, except they are shaped like this." He reshapes the fog into an enormous serpent shape-

A demonstration that Temperance decides to interrupt by shapeshifting themselves. They are about the same size of the dragon, but obviously lacking limbs, but they frilly fins along their blue-scaled body.

"Neat. I can turn into stuff near my size, but nothing like that."

"It's easier for Temperance to do that, but they sort of push to bigger sizes. That said that was kind of frivolous, if illustrative." He speaks a few words in their language.

Temperance-the-serpent nods, touches and reaches Reon with the end of their tail.

And then changes again, now they have the upper body of a green-haired woman (covered for modesty with their veil) with the lower parts of a horse-like creature. Pointy ears poke out of the green hair.