Pero Mariga is a sixteen-year-old student. She does well in classes, hangs out with her friends, occasionally helps out on her father's repairman job to get some hands-on experience with machinery. And she wants magic more than anything. Why wouldn't you? Magic lets you shapeshift. Supposedly, if you get good enough at it, it lets you live longer. And you can use it to help people in ways that there aren't lots of people already doing! Yeah, magic would be awesome.

At this particular moment, Mariga is riding the bus home, thinking about how cool magic would be and what form she would take. She's thought about it a lot, but of course without trying it she can't tell what form would feel Right.

There are no flashing lights, no sparkles. Nothing outside of Mariga's head indicates to the other occupants of the bus that anything has changed. 

But between one instant and the next, she becomes aware that, if she wanted to change shape, she could. All she has to do is fix her desired form in her mind, with all the details of size and shape and colour filled in, then take this indescribable mental action to transform. She'll be able to return to her original form any time she likes, and she'll have to go back to it when she runs out of magical energy for the time being. On the plus side, she can keep altering and refining her new magical form forever!  

(There is also a diffident suggestion that, since her time in her new form will be limited at first, she might want to wait for the best moment to try it.) 

!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mariga's on a bus and doesn't have a mirror. And a lot of the forms sketched in her school notebook would interact differently with bus seats than this one does. She will very reluctantly wait the twenty minutes until she gets to her stop, then dash upstairs to her bedroom, yelling "Hi Mom hi Dad I got magic gotta go set up my form see you at dinner!"

Okay, now to take off all her clothes and get down to business. Her new form should have glittering blue scales instead of skin or hair, patterned like this and overlapping like so. It should have dragon wings and a long flexible tail and be even shorter than she is now so the wings will work. It should have hollow bird bones, and bright green eyes, and long fingers and toes ending in something in between nails and claws. Go!

Now there's a flash of light. Just a brief one, and just bright enough that it fills the room. 

And then she is something new, between one blink and the next. There's a sensation in the back of her mind like an hourglass flipping over. Glittering sand begins to drain from the new top into the empty half below. Somehow, she knows the sand represents her time remaining in her magical form before she has to change back. No way to tell how long, just yet, but she'll be able to see when it's close to running out. 

Oh, that does feel nice. Mariga stretches her wings, flexes her claws, twitches her lovely new tail. She had always hoped that if she got magic it would fix the sense of wrongness, of subtle disgust and dissatisfaction with being embodied, that's been plaguing her for goodness knows how long. And it does. Not completely, not yet, but she can tell that with more experimentation and practice she'll be truly happy with her body.

The sense of urgency from knowing she's going to have to go back to human soon meshes weirdly with the reassurance that she'll always have magic. On the scale of the coming minutes, she is going to enjoy this while she's got it. In her case, that means tweaking it more. First, is anything about this version consuming magic just from existing? Can she even tell?

It doesn't seem to be; when she investigates, the magic tells her this is a normal amount of magic consumption given that she's standing around doing nothing. A tiny bit slower than normal, if anything. Maybe poking and prodding at the details of her magic is good for it?

On that note, it isn't just Mariga's physical shape that's changed. She had magic already, but now, in this form, she is magic. She doesn't have a clear sense of what else she can do yet, but there's at least one other new mental action she can take, aside from transforming.

The magic lets her know that using her mysterious new abilities will make the metaphorical sand drain through the hourglass faster than if she just went around in magical form. She can also tell that there are things she can do to slow the sand down or even make it flow upwards, granting her more time to play with her new form and powers. 

So many things to try! She doesn't want to try flying just yet, not when she might fall out of the sky if she loses track of time. Instead she'll experiment with her eyes. She can give them reflective layers like a cat's! She can move the blood vessels to the place they ought to be so they aren't in the way and she doesn't have a blind spot! She might even be able to give herself extra cones, where's her anatomy textbook, there it is, yeah she wants some cones that get these wavelengths, does that go through?

The magic would be delighted to make those changes for her! It corrects a little bit of the detail work on the cones to get exactly what she wants, but otherwise just does what she tells it to do. (The sand trickles even slower, but it's still falling. She has maybe fifteen or twenty minutes left.)

Now she has cat-like reflective eyes that can see a little way into the ultraviolet and infrared parts of the spectrum! Getting rid of her blind spot doesn't noticeably change anything about the way the world looks, but she can test it and check. 

Yeah, the blind spot was really more about the principle of the thing, but it's cool to check and see that it's gone. Seeing infrared and ultraviolet, on the other hand, is extremely cool. Her eyes should also resemble a cat's in pupil shape, now she thinks about it, because that's just cool.

She picks up a pencil, tries writing with it, refines her claws and the scales on her fingers for better grip and more dexterity. It wouldn't do to have a form that couldn't take notes or sketch a blueprint.

Indeed it would not.

The magic continues to be very obliging about changing things to suit Mariga's preferences, and her time in magical form continues to sloooowly run down. It looks like it'll stick around long enough to show her parents, or she could take a photo on her smartwatch to show them later. 

She shows them in person when she has a few minutes left. They don't seem to understand how totally awesome her new form is, and are in fact a bit discomfited by how inhuman she got and how quickly, but once they get accustomed they're sure she's going to do great and accomplish all sorts of things.

And then her magic runs out of charge and drops her unceremoniously back in her original form. She got less than half an hour, in total. And now that she's in this form, the other mental actions available to her, the ones attached to mystery powers, have disappeared. All Mariga can do with her magic from here is transform, and she doesn't have enough of it for that at the moment. 

The metaphorical hourglass flips over, so the sand is all in the upper half. Sand grains start falling, very slowly, building up charge at a rate of about one per second. At this rate, it'll be a while before she can transform again. But, the magic reminds Mariga, she can do things to change how fast the sand flows. 

Dropping back to human form is like expecting one more step than the staircase has, combined with sticking her hand in something gross. She resolves to build up a nice big charge before the next time she transforms, so she can put off doing that again as long as possible.

That evening she eats dinner with her parents (and talks about their work and her schoolwork and magic), does her homework (she finished most of it at school), and checks out the internet's supply of "so you just got magic" pages.

Here's one that's neatly laid out in clear, grammatically-correct language, on a well-organized website with no obnoxious colours or silly animations. It has footnotes. 

Most magical people get magic between the ages of 13 and 18, but if you're a little older or younger, don't worry. Statistically, people who get magic earlier or later aren't any different in other ways.^[1] The youngest recorded magical person was a few weeks away from her twelfth birthday, and the oldest person to get magic was 22.^[2][3]

There are links to anatomy guides, fashion dictionaries, pages on colour theory, and other resources for optimizing your magical form, or "magiform". A whole page of the website is dedicated to names people have invented for "magical person" in more than a dozen languages, including tentative translations into the major centaur tongue.

Other sections explain how magic works, covering topics like how to recharge, how to figure out your unique powers, and ways to get better at magic. There's also a section on finding groups of magical people in your area. 

FAQ

Magiforms 101

Magiform Tips - Anatomy

Magiform Tips - Fashion

Magiform Tips - Colour Theory

Magic Theory 101

Magic Theory - Charge & Recharging

Magic Theory - Unique Powers

Magic Theory - How To Improve

What Are We Called?

But What Do I DO With It?

Connect With Other Magicals

Well, this is obviously going to end with way too many open tabs. She starts with the four magical theory ones; they look like they'll be practical without making her as desperate to transform again as the tips pages.

Magic Theory 101

You are a magical person, which means you can use magic. The amount of magic you have to use at a time is called charge. You spend charge to do magic, and it builds back up over time. See Charge & Recharging for more on how to recharge faster. 

While you're in your original form and not transformed, all you can do with magic is transform. Spending time in regular form lets you build up charge faster, because you're not using it for anything.

While you're in magiform, you spend magical charge constantly to stay transformed, and you can also use it to power your unique abilities. You can regain charge in magiform, but it's harder because it's balanced out by what you're spending. 

How much charge you expend just by staying in magiform depends on whether your magiform obeys the laws of physics, or if it needs magic just to make it work. See the Anatomy page for tips on how to reduce magic expenditure—for example, if you have wings that can't really lift you, you'll spend extra charge every time you try to fly with them. 

Every magical person has at least one unique power other than the ability to transform. If you have more than one power, they usually follow some kind of theme. You gain more powers, or your existing ones get stronger, the more you refine your magiform. (If you don't have any powers yet, it's because your magiform needs work, not because you don't have any.) See Unique Powers for help figuring out what your powers are, what they can do, and what your theme might be. 

Over time, most magical people find that accumulating charge gets easier, they can spend longer in magiform, and they have access to stronger powers. See How To Improve for some techniques that make this easier. 

 

Have more questions? Check the FAQ. 

She should read the FAQ before going farther into the theory. She's taking notes, of course, and she flips to a new page to write down anything surprising from the FAQ.

FAQ

Q: I witnessed a magical incident or magic-related crime. Who should I report it to? 
A: Here are some links to contact details for the appropriate authorities in Azama, Bhier, Gidran, Tenzhan, and Parabi. If you see your country's name, click on it; if not, you'll have to do your own research. Let me know what you find and I'll add it to the list. 

Q: Are you going to make a version of this website in my language? 
A: I'm working on translating it into Bhiran. For resources in other languages, see this page. 

Q: Who are you anyway?/How do you know so much about magic?/Why are you qualified to tell me about this?
A: My name is Radha. I've had magic for the last seven years, and I've spent that time finding out as much as I can about magic and magical people. My unique powers are telekinesis and time manipulation, and I'm a member of Sideways, a magical problem-solving team operating out of Corali, Azama. 

Q: I think I might have magic, but I'm not sure. How do I tell?
A: If you had magic, you'd know, because it would tell you. It's not possible to have magic and be unaware of it. 

Q: Why do some people get magic and not others?/I really want magic! Is there something I can do to increase my chances of getting it?
A: No-one knows. A lot of studies have been done on this subject, so we know magic doesn't choose people based on genetics, ethnicity, sexuality, morality, religion, diet, location, or a whole list of other qualities.^[1] Studies have found that magical people are about twice as likely as the average person to be transgender, but that's not something you can change about yourself and trying doesn't tend to result in magic.^[2][3]

Q: I heard that magic makes you gay/trans/kinky/polygamous. Is that true? 
A: No, there's no evidence for any of that. 

Q: I heard that magical people are immortal. Is that true?
A: Not really. Our magiforms can be whatever physical age we want, so if someone managed to build up enough charge to stay in magiform forever, they wouldn't die of old age. They could still die in other ways, though, unless their powers protected them. 

Q: Can animals be magical, or is it just people? What about centaurs? 
A: Wildlife researchers haven't noticed any animals transforming, and centaurs say they don't have any magical people.^[4] 

Q: But isn't magic eeevil?
A: Evil is hard to quantify, but statistical analysis shows that magical people aren't significantly more likely to commit crimes than before they got magic, correcting for age and other factors.^[5] Also, they're not significantly more crime-prone than the rest of the population.^[6]

Q: That's not what I meant! I meant that magical people are godless heathens!
A: Magical people show the same distribution of religious beliefs as the rest of the population, with the exception that some magical people who were previously atheists or agnostic have converted to the Fellowship of Enlightenment, a religion which essentially worships magic.^[7][8] People with existing religious beliefs tend to attribute magic to their own gods.

Q: Why doesn't your website acknowledge that magic is clearly the work of my deity/deities?
A: I have received questions along these lines from every religion with a significant Makazo-speaking population, and a few others with varying levels of fluency and coherence. At the time of writing and to the best of my knowledge, no divine entities have yet come forward to claim credit for introducing magic to the world. 

Q: Why doesn't magic work like in my favourite fantasy series/this better version I made up/exactly the same except for my pet peeve?
A: I don't know. All I can tell you is how magic works, not why. All I will say is that it would be very surprising if the author of a fantasy series, writing before the first magical people existed, had managed to correctly predict how magic would work.

Nothing particularly shocking in there, as is often the case with FAQs for the general public. Onward, to the rest of the magical theory pages!

Charge & Recharging

"Charge" is the amount of magical energy you have available at a time. You can spend it to transform and (while transformed) to use your unique powers. Spending time in magiform also drains charge.

Fun fact: On average, a magical person has enough charge for 17 minutes in magiform the first time they transform, assuming they don't use any other powers.^[1]

If you don't do anything special, you'll recharge slowly while in your mundane form. Sleeping for 8 hours, which we use as a convenient baseline because you're not doing anything to throw it off, will bring you back up to about a third of your maximum capacity, which grows over time. For a new magical person, that might translate to half an hour in magiform; for someone who's been practicing magic for longer, it could be several hours' worth of charge.^[2]

Sleeping isn't usually the most efficient way to recharge, though. Hanging around awake can be slightly worse, depending on what you're doing, but you'll find that some activities are a lot better for recharging. Unfortunately, this is highly individual and varies from one magical person to the next, but a general guideline is that activities you find enjoyable and/or rewarding will give you more charge than things you hate or find boring.^[3] If you have a favourite hobby, that's likely to be a good way to recharge.

(Author's note: One of the best recharging activities for me is reading, especially nonfiction. My brother finds reading nonfiction worse than sleeping, and recharges best by playing Dungeons & Dragons. It's different for everyone.)

If you don't have many hobbies, or you don't have any that you enjoy, it might be worth trying out a few that catch your interest, especially if there's one you've been meaning to try but haven't found the time. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, taking time away from magic can help you get more of it done. That said, many people find that playing with their powers, or refining their magiform, is rewarding in itself and therefore helps them recharge. 

Huh, she got longer than average the first time, probably from all the tweaking. 

It's really good that recharging goes as a percent of capacity, because that means getting charge gets easier over time rather than just storing it.

She definitely finds all things magic rewarding, and suspects magic-related research is similar! Having magic is so great, even if she's now even more aware of having skin than previously. She reads on.

Unique Powers

As the name suggests, unique powers are different for every magical person, so there's a limit to how much a general guide can help you figure them out. That said, here are some aspects of powers that are relatively consistent.

Before you had magic, did you dream about having one specific power, or being able to do one specific thing? If so, chances are that you'll be able to do it eventually, even if it's not your first power. If you have multiple powers, they'll be shaped around that one thing. 

Every magical person has a theme to their suite of powers: it's rare to find someone who can both conjure fireballs and make plants grow, for example, unless they conceptualise those as the same thing somehow. Themes can be fairly abstract and general, though, and the connections between powers aren't always obvious, especially once someone has three or more powers.

Often, later powers seem to "branch off" in different directions from the first, so somebody with telepathy might grow the ability to speak to animals and a hypnosis power. Taken on their own, the latter two aren't obviously connected, but they're both outgrowths of the initial telepathy, and come under a broader umbrella of "mind magic".  

(Personal example: the power I always wanted was time manipulation, the ability to make the world slow down or stop so I had time for everything I wanted to do. Telekinesis would have been a close second if you'd asked me to choose one. The first power I manifested was the ability to stop a moving object, which has branched out into telekinesis and, recently, the ability to slow down time.)

Now that you have some idea what your powers might be, how do you trigger them? Some people do it accidentally or instinctively, when a situation comes up where the power would be useful. For example, falling off something might trigger a flight power, or wanting to stop being the centre of attention might activate your invisibility. 

(Personal example: I discovered my first power when someone shouted, "Think fast!" and threw a ball at my face. I threw up my hands, willing it to stop—and it did.)

Alternatively, you can try activating your powers deliberately, with an act of will similar to the one you use to transform. If you don't know what you can do, this has to be a fairly general "I want to use my magic", but it sometimes helps to specify a target: "I want to do magic to that piece of paper". In case your power is something destructive, it's best to choose something you won't miss and put it on a surface that's hard to damage. 

Some powers, such as telepathy or animal speech, need a living target. Start with objects, but if nothing happens, a good next step is to try using magic on plants, an animal if you can find one, and then a consenting person. Other powers might need specific substances available: hydrokinesis needs water, for example. Try using magic in different environments, like the park or the bath. 

Have a particularly stubborn or shy power? Get in contact with other magical people and ask them for more tips. Have a trick that worked for you? Let me know. 

There's a link to a wiki that's attempting to catalogue every known power. Some abilities seem to come up a lot with different variations, like telekinesis and telepathy, but no two powers work exactly the same way. 

Mariga is pretty sure her unique power is going to be something with persistent effects, possibly on the theme of "making stuff". She writes down a list of things to try:

* Look for mental actions

* Generic magic on:

- an object (rock, paper, water, air)

- a location 

- a plant

- an animal

- myself

* ask for volunteer classmates? Find local magic group?

Doing experiments on her powers is going to be so great. Hopefully by this weekend she'll have enough charge for a solid few hours of testing. Relatedly, the next page is the promising "how to improve".

It is indeed.

How To Improve

Getting better at magic is a dual process: on one side, you need to refine your magiform to increase your maximum charge and gain access to stronger powers. On the other, you need to identify more efficient methods of recharging, so you can stay in magiform for longer and use your powers more frequently. 

Both of these processes, fortunately, rely on the same underlying skill: self-knowledge. It's been fairly conclusively proven that there's no objective standard for magiforms, and what's "better" for one person's magiform has no bearing on what's "better" for someone else.^[1] Studies have also shown that the strength of a particular magiform is directly correlated with how much the person likes it: in other words, the magic and the magical person agree on what constitutes an improvement to their form.^[2] 

This means that refining your magiform is about knowing what you like and what you want—the same skill that helps you figure out how to recharge, just applied to what you want to be instead of what you want to do. 

Naturally, this is a highly individual process, but here are some tips if you're struggling. 

1. Try things. Even if you have some idea what sorts of things you like and don't like, but especially if you haven't got a clue, take a step back and experiment with different options, especially ones outside your normal comfort zone. Sometimes, you'll immediately hate the idea, and over time you'll get better at recognising what sort of things you don't even need to try. At first, though, you'll probably need to at least take a minute to imagine it in detail, even if you don't actually take on the form or attempt the activity, to gauge how you feel about something new. 

For magiform variations to try, check Magiforms 101. For hobbies, try your school or university's list of clubs, or look online for ideas. 

2. Journal. This one isn't for everyone, but some people find that keeping a journal of some kind can help them get better at noticing how they think and feel about things. On the most basic level, you could use a notebook to keep track of how good different activities are: write down what activity you tried, what you thought of it, and how much charge it gave you. It can also help to keep a daily journal, recording your general mood for the day and any significant events. If you're the sort of person who thinks best on paper, you can use your journal for more in-depth emotional processing or to help you make decisions. 

3. Make art. If writing in a journal doesn't work for you, you can try more creative and expressive methods of getting in touch with your emotions. Drawing, painting, playing music, and writing poetry or stories are all used in therapy to help people express emotions they can't put into words directly. As a bonus, if you find a type of art you enjoy, it will also help you recharge.^[3] 

4. Talk to someone. This can be a friend or family member, someone who knows you well and can potentially point out things about you that you can't see from the inside. It can also help to talk to a counsellor or therapist. It's a common misconception, but you don't need to be mentally ill to go to a counsellor—all you need is a problem you want help with, and this definitely qualifies. 

5. Study psychology. Find books, or read on the internet, about the ways human minds work and all of the different ways they can be. Again, this isn't for everyone, but if you're the type who likes learning and theory then this can be a path towards a better understanding of your own mind. You could even take a psychology class or two. (Author's note: I never took a class in psychology, but I did a lot of reading about it in the first few years. It's the way I learn best.)

6. Ask other magicals for help. Remember, this might be an individual journey, but you're not the first person to walk it. Working with other magical people is one of the best—and most fun—ways to push your magic to its limits and expand your knowledge of what you can do. Find your local team here. 

That's some good advice! Mariga's already taking notes; she adds a page with columns "date", "activity", "rating", and "comments". She gives "working on magiform" 90/100 (because immediately giving something a 100 might mess up her scale later), "talking to parents" a 60, and "reading about magic" a 70. Then she writes a list of hobbies to try, including her existing ones (robotics club, reading fiction, reading nonfiction) and some new ones (baking, local magic group, flying) and a reminder to look into jobs and volunteer work where having magic in general or her particular form and powers will be useful. She opens the "find your local group" page in a new tab, but starts reading the magiform suggestions page first.

Magiforms 101

"Magiform" is an abbreviation of "magical form". It's the shape you transform into with your magic. Staying in magiform costs charge, but lets you use your other powers. 

When you transform, any clothes you're wearing will either stay on your new form, fall to the floor if your magiform is too small, or be tucked away with your mundane form. You choose what happens to each item. The same thing happens to anything you're carrying, although you have to be fully supporting something's weight to tuck it away. 

Your magiform can be anything you like. Many people keep a human shape, but might add wings, gills, horns, or extra limbs. You can also take the shape of any real or imaginary animal, or even have a body made of plants, rocks, or metal. A body made out of solid rock or metal will cost extra charge because it wouldn't naturally bend in the ways you need, unless you add joints and articulation. For more tips on how to make sure your magiform works physically, see the Anatomy page. 

Once you have a basic shape, you can customise all the details, down to the colour and texture of each individual hair or feather. You can give it clothes, as well, and customise those in the same way. See the Fashion and Colour Theory pages for more. 

Any part of your magiform that detaches from the rest will vanish after about six seconds once you're no longer touching it. This includes clothes, accessories and weapons. If you accidentally drop something, you can easily recreate it. The six-second counter restarts every time you touch the item. 

When you are injured in magiform, you can heal yourself just as easily as any other tweak. Your magiform doesn't physically age unless you want it to, and it doesn't get ill. If you grow powerful enough to stay in magiform full-time, the only thing standing between you and immortality will be the possibility of a magical attack. 

List of popular magiforms to try
* marks forms that can cost extra charge; ** marks very charge-intensive forms

Humanoid
- *Wings (see Anatomy for suggested wingspan by height)
- Four arms
- Cat ears and tail (fox, dog and wolf also popular)
- Different sex
- Different body type (muscular, fat, thin, short, tall)
- Skin, eye and hair colours (both normal and impossible)
- Plants or feathers instead of hair
- Fur or scales instead of skin

Animal
- Griffin, lion, winged lion
- Wolf, fox, dog
- Unicorn, winged horse, winged unicorn
- Centaur
- Eagle, hawk, swan
- Lizard, snake (cold-blooded - make sure you're somewhere warm)
- *Dragon (see the Anatomy page for why a large dragon is a bad idea)
- Dolphin, shark, fish (in water)
- Octopus, jellyfish (in water)

Plant-based
- *Tree
- **Vines
- *Wooden doll with articulated joints
- **Pile of fruit or vegetables held in a shape with magic

Mineral
- *Metal robot (try different metals: gold is heavy, but you could use gold-plated aluminium)
- **Rock golem
- **Sand held in whatever shape you like
- *Metal and gemstones
- Embed gemstones and/or metal patterns in an otherwise organic body

The clothes thing would have been useful to know before she showed off her form to her parents wearing a backwards bathrobe. She takes a pause from reading to sketch some ideas for shirts and skirts that accommodate her wings and tail, and also an Ultimate Coat of Ultimate Pockets.

Apparently "large dragons" are a bad idea. Being a four-foot-tall dragon is in Mariga's opinion an awesome idea, so presumably they just mean she can't be the size of a bus. 

She can embed gemstones and metal in herself? That's awesome and also she should try giving herself synthetic bones, for the greater strength and lightness and for the cool factor. Based on a quick search, she should try both titanium and carbon fiber composite in various structural shapes and see what works best. It's not like she can permanently injure herself (everything is awesome) so might as well be audacious. Also (notetake notetake) she should have an extremely high density of taste buds and look up how to give herself super hearing. Speaking of which, it's time for the anatomy page! 

The anatomy page is, indeed, of the opinion that four-foot dragons are fine and dragons the size of a bus are inadvisable. This is both for reasons of magic consumption and also practical considerations such as being able to fit on a bus.

It has formulas for working out the wingspan you need based on your height and weight, with notes that once you get much past the upper range of human height it becomes practically impossible to have wings that are both light enough and strong enough without magical assistance, and to even get that far you need to swap out bones and skin for composites like carbon fiber. There are different tables for batlike and feathered wings since the weight of feathers makes a difference. Mariga has already done similar calculations and her wings are within tolerances for non-magically-assisted flight. 

There's a list of minor tweaks that can be made to a human body to improve functionality: eyes are poorly designed, as are noses, these specific intersections of nerves here and here, tailbones, funny bones...

And here are the size limits past which a human body needs magic to function, and here are the tolerances for how thin you can make your bones and how much fat you can strip away and how much weight you can pile on...

The page ends with a list of places to find more detailed information on specific topics. 

Useful Links

Humanoids
Arguments Against Intelligent Design: The design flaws in the human body
Human Diversity: an artist's catalogue - Facial Features
Human Diversity: an artist's catalogue - Body Types
Beautiful Bodies - Celebrating Disability & Diversity

Animals and animal features
Everything Birds: Wing Shapes Guide
Smell like a butterfly, see like a bee: Animal Senses
When Is Red Not Red? Seeing The World Like A Squid
The Great Big Guide To Every Animal Ever
Why the giant flying lizards in your fantasy novel are unrealistic

Plants & inorganic materials
Flowers and their Meanings: A flower dictionary
How To Make A Robot That Works
Dollmaker's Guide To Joints
Mannequins Mastered
Amateur Puppetry An Introduction
'Iron and steel will bend and bow...' Choosing The Right Metal
The Gemcutter's Bible

Mariga might just go full robot. If she can get it working without extra magic, being designed from the ground up would be so much better than being a collection of hacks on top of biology. And she knows more engineering than anatomy already. She reads the inorganic materials pages and bookmarks the facial features and body shape pages for later, then checks out the fashion page.

Magiform Tips - Fashion

The first thing to know about clothing your magiform is that you don't have to restrict yourself clothes that are physically possible to make or put on. Any seams or fastenings you add are unnecessary and purely decorative. Similarly, you can mix materials together, or invent new ones, in ways that would be impossible without magic. 

 The second thing to remember is that anything you create with magic will disappear if you lose contact with it for more than six seconds. You don't have to be wearing it - carrying something in your hand or over your arm works just as well - but if you have something orbiting your head, for example, or hovering above you, expect to have to renew it about ten times a minute. 

Thirdly, the only criteria you should be worrying about are your own tastes and what looks and feels good on you. Don't feel like you have to restrict yourself to the clothing of your own country, era, or gender. On that note, at the bottom of the page are some guides to the fashion of different modern and historical cultures. Use these as inspiration, but mix and match however you like. 

The rest of the page is this website's characteristic well-organised list of links to further reading.

A note at the very bottom says:

Want to see some examples? The Sideways website has pictures of the team in our magiforms. 

Putting serious effort into clothes should wait until she's more confident in a particular body plan and configuration of limbs, but Mariga opens a few tabs of reference images for later in case she feels the need for outside inspiration. Color theory might actually be useful for doing her scales, eyes, and so forth, though, so she'll read that now.

The colour theory page, unsurprisingly, contains advice on colour theory, which this margin is too small to contain. Like the rest of the website, it stresses the importance of individuality over conforming to any objective standards. It covers concepts like saturation, luminosity, and the effects of texture on the way a colour is perceived in context, including some tricks it's possible to do—entirely without magical maintenance—that can make an object appear different colours depending on the lighting or the angle. 

Summary

- Pick one or two signature hues and vary the value, saturation and texture when you use them in different places. Don't use too many different colours unless you're going for a rainbow effect; three plus neutrals is plenty. 
- If you're going pastel, go pastel. If you're going for bright colours, go bright. Once you've identified a palette or an aesthetic you like, lean in. 
- Gold, the metal, is not a neutral and does not go with everything. But, like black, metals go with a lot of things.
- Caveat: mixing metals is hard mode. Lean into it or risk it looking like an oversight. 
- Consider silhouettes and contrast. Juxtapose areas of dark and light. 
- Balance is important. Use a colour in different places all over your outfit, or just once as a statement piece, but the latter is harder to pull off. Make your hat match your skirt, or your boots match your scarf, unless you have a reason to draw attention to the hat or the boots. 
- Don't forget to consider your skin tone, hair and eyes as part of your palette. You can play with colours there as well. 

The bits on making yourself look different colors from different angles are super neat. Also, she is totally going to have gorgeous ultraviolet detailing that only she (and other magicals, and bees and so forth) can see.

She can read about "What Are We Called?", "But What Do I DO With It?", and "Connect With Other Magicals" tomorrow. Tonight she's going to go to bed at a reasonable hour. Then she can wake up bright and early, shower (her new form is going to be a ROBOT and never need shampooing), eat breakfast (granola, also food is like the one thing worth being human for) and get to school early so she can hit the interlibrary loan for robotics books.

By the time Mariga wakes up in the morning, her charge is above the halfway mark and the magic thinks she could spend maybe thirty or forty minutes in magiform. 

The school library doesn't have any books on robotics that she hasn't already read, but there are several available on interlibrary loan. Arranging that bumps her charge up a little more, and by the end of her last class, she's not too far off fully charged. Unfortunately, that's less than an hour's worth. 

Well, no sense staying at full charge when she can't accumulate more. She tops off the rest of the way at robotics club, working on their soccer-playing RC bot while bouncing magiform design ideas off her clubmates. Then she heads out to the empty baseball diamond and works on her form, focusing on aspects that will transfer straightforwardly to an eventual robot version. Specifically, she tries out having four arms in addition to wings and replacing all her hinge joints with ball-and-socket joints. She also tries out having eyes in the back of her head, though she sits on a bench for that one in case it's problematic enough to make her fall over. Her clothes are boring white shirt and skirt with a tail-hole, for now, since she doesn't want to get attached to an outfit while so much of what it will go on is still up in the air.

Two extra arms on top of wings are enough to make her fairly top-heavy, even with the tail balancing things out. Sitting down is a good idea even before she adds the extra eyes. Speaking of which, having eyes in the back of her head is very strange, and her brain doesn't seem to know what to do with its new all-around field of vision. The visual feeds from both sets of eyes end up sort of layered over each other, like a holographic picture that's two different images at once depending on how you hold it. 

Ball-and-socket joints work, but the tendons need some reconfiguring before she can make proper use of her new range of motion. Her knees are a bit wobbly at first. 

Extra eyes are a big old Nope. Maybe she can just widen her peripheral vision a bit when she switches to cameras.  In the meantime, how about a sort of centaur-dragon body type, with four legs and four arms and wings and a tail? That should take some of the strain off her knees and help with stability, and also looks a bit better in her opinion. Only downside is it might make her too heavy to fly, even if she shrinks to four feet tall at the shoulder and takes advantage of her extra torso space to let her wings be larger and still fold up unproblematically.

Being an eleven-limbed miniature centaur dragon feels pretty cool, but there's no way to tell whether she could fly without magical help unless she tries it. The worst that can happen is she'll end up spending charge to stay in the air and lose out on some time in magiform, but as long as she's sensible about it she shouldn't run out in midair. 

Then she will take a cantering start, spread her wings and launch herself into the air!

Flying is awesome. 

The city falls away beneath her as her wings beat, carrying her higher with every stroke. It's not getting dark yet, but the sun is beginning to dip towards the horizon, turning the clouds interesting colours. 

On the other side of the city, silhouetted against the sky, another dragon-winged shape circles, turning in Mariga's direction—

—and is suddenly larger, or closer, or both. 

Mariga loves the world and everything in it. The trees and buildings spreading out below her, the golden light of the evening giving everything the look of a work of art, the strength of her wings as they almost bear her aloft on their own. She can tell that they're not quite enough, they need magic help, but when she's made of the stuff of airplanes instead of flesh and blood, she'll be able to make it sustainable. A little more research, a few more experiments, and she'll be a free creature of the air, carried by physics and her own magically aided design, with all the limbs she didn't know she always wanted. 

Ooh, another person! Another magical, even. She lifts an arm from where it's been folded against her side and waves in greeting.

This person has clearly realised the full implications of being able to modify one's magiform at will and is taking advantage of it to make themself lighter for flight by removing unnecessary limbs. They have two massive golden-bronze wings, bigger than Mariga's, two taloned limbs tucked up beneath them, and are otherwise basically a giant snake with scales that shimmer in shades of bronze, gold and red. As they fly closer, the red reveals itself to actually be gemstones embedded in the scales. There are a few dark purple gems along the snaky neck, and a handful of other colours dotted about. 

The other magical person slows down to make a wide, sinuous loop around Mariga, ending up flying alongside her. They peer at her curiously with one purple eye. 

"Hello! My name's Mariga, I just got magic yesterday! Flying is grand, isn't it?"

"It iiisss." Their voice is deep, hoarse and sibilant, like a stereotypical dragon in a show. 

"You look good, for your second day." 

"Thanks! I'm probably going to do it all over in a robot version later. What's your name?"

"Robot?" the dragon repeats, intrigued. They flip over to fly upside down below Mariga so they can look at her through both eyes. 

"I'm Akeri. Wayfarer." 

"It's good to meet you. Do you live around here? I haven't seen you before, unless you totally reworked and I'm failing to recognize you."

They laugh, a deep rumbling sound like rocks scraping together. "I travel. It's in the name." 

"True enough! Anything in particular you wanted to see here, or just passing through?"

"Always meant to come here at some point. Might stick around, you're interesting."

Akeri swooshes through the air, long snakelike body drawing a spiral around Mariga's approximately-straight-line flight. No part of their body is ever still, even relative to Mariga. 

"Met the local group yet?" 

(Mariga has now used more than half of her charge.)

"Thanks! I haven't met the group, but I definitely plan to."

They nod. 

"Got time to learn some tricks?" 

"I need to be back on the ground in twenty minutes, but if it's faster than that, sure!"

They nod. "Watch!" 

Turns out you can do all sorts of cool swoopy acrobatic tricks when you're a dragon. 

Margaret copies them. "Whooooohoo! So much better than gym class." 

But all too soon: "I really have to land before I fall out of the sky. If you'd rather keep flying, it was nice to meet you!"

"Likewise. See you around." 

Akeri hangs around long enough to make sure Mariga makes it safely to the ground, then they flap their wings and soar away. 

Mariga's time in magiform is about to run out. She can change back early if she wants. 

Nope. She will start walking home, bracing herself for the crash, then continue walking home while readjusting to human shape again. At home she works on blueprints so intensely she sees them inside her eyelids while she's trying to fall asleep.

The crash is a little harder this time, probably because her magiform is now even further from human than before, but she was expecting it and could brace for it. 

Working on blueprints is a good activity for recharging, about as good as playing with magiforms earlier after accounting for the drain on charge while she was transformed. Better than sleeping, but that's also important. By the time she wakes up, she's around two-thirds charged, but that's still only enough for less than an hour in magiform. 

If she doesn't use her charge now she'll hit full during class and not be able to use it efficiently, so she'll scarf her breakfast on the walk to school and spend the time thus saved on the practice field again, trying to figure out what her power does. Does an undirected attempt to "do some magic" produce anything?

At this time of day, the practice field has a few other kids around. A small group of teenagers a few years younger than Mariga are tossing a ball back and forth at one end of the field, but they stop to stare at her when she transforms. 

Trying to "do magic" without directing it at anything in particular does...nothing.

She waves at the staring people, then picks a blade of grass and tries doing magic at it.

This does...something? Mariga has a little bit less charge than she did a second ago, and the blade of grass now appears to be glowing faintly blue. 

(One of the staring people tentatively waves back. The ball she was holding falls to the ground, forgotten. The rest of them seem to be keeping their cool, but there's some whispering going on.)

She did a thing she did a thing! Does the grass seem to be at all different other than the glowing? Can she make it glow brighter? Can she make it glow purple instead of blue?

When she inspects the grass closely, she gets a sort of sense that it's magic, kind of the same way she can tell that about herself. It's still grass, and still behaves exactly like normal grass other than glowing and being magic.

She can totally make it glow brighter and change the colour! This takes a tiny bit more of her magic but not as much as making it glow in the first place. 

What if she tries something completely different, like making the blade of grass more rigid and difficult to bend?

It doesn't seem to want to do both "rigid" and "glowing" at once, and trying will take a fair amount more power than just one on its own, but it's doable. Now Mariga has a tough glowing blade of grass, and...half an hour of magiform left.

Unlike transforming, the effects on the grass don't seem to be costly to sustain, just to create in the first place. 

There are a lot of blades of grass on this field, and her magiform doesn't really fit at a desk anyway. (She'll look into accomodations for that once she can hold more charge.) She tries making one just rigid, and one not glowing but pink, and one persistently cool to the touch.

Changing something's colour is relatively easy. Making something persistently cooler to the touch is harder than making it rigid, but the overall drain on her magic is still pretty small since it's only a blade of grass. She's got the charge for a few more of these. 

One of the ball-playing kids comes up to Mariga. "Hey, uh, what are you...doing?" 

"I'm figuring out what my magic can do! I'm really new to it. Apparently I can change the properties of things!" She shows him her handful of slightly unnatural grass blades and starts working on one that toggles between pink and blue when poked. Also, which of these are persistently draining her and which were a one-off expenditure, she should revert any in the former category before she runs out of charge in case they make her accumulate it more slowly.

"Whoa, cool!" 

Most of her magical grass isn't draining charge on an ongoing basis, although the first few test subjects are starting to fade a little and she could spend some more charge to make them keep being magic. The new one drains a little bit of charge every time it changes colour, but that's it. 

"Thanks!"

Okay, so she can't do "programmable" without ongoing charge use. Can she de-magic that one entirely? Can she then transfigure it into plastic?

It turns out de-magicking something is easy and costs nothing to do. Turning something into plastic, on the other hand, is surprisingly difficult! It'll take most of her remaining charge. 

Well, that makes sense, it's a much bigger and more fundamental change than the other stuff. She can already think of loads of applications for transmutation and temperature changes and she can probably increase the tensile strength of materials and maybe their electrical conductivity too. What an excellent power for an aspiring engineer, not that it's at all a surprise that her power is something she thinks is excellent. She makes one more piece of grass start glowing, then grits her teeth and lets herself go human again. At least she gets to see whether either the material change or the glow lasts through the switch--her guess is that the former will and the latter might or might not.

The magical grass continues to be magical, even once Mariga detransforms. She now has several glowing and otherwise oddly-behaving blades of grass, and one tiny sliver of plastic in the shape of a grass blade. 

Also, she should probably get to class. 

Give her a minute, she's just lost the majority of her limbs.

Okay, now class. With a pocket full of magical grass blades.

Class proceeds as it always does, but by lunchtime, word of Mariga's magic has spread around most of the school. A few people approach her and ask for demonstrations. 

She can show them her magic grass blades! Requests to see her transform get deferred with "I used all my charge this morning, and also detransforming feels really weird so I'd rather not do it for short periods." She can show the photos of her first attempt, though, if anyone's interested.

People are interested! Mariga isn't the only magical person most of them have met, nor even the only one in the school, but they're rare enough to make her the centre of attention at least for the next few days. 

The magical grass loses its lustre after a while, both metaphorically and literally. The various effects have all worn off by the end of the day, although some lasted longer than others.

Mariga takes detailed notes on what lasted how long, which is good for her charge in the moment and could come in handy later. She also resolves to meet the other magical people in the school, now that she can look at them without burning with envy. Is she at full charge by the end of the school day again?

Not quite, but she's not far off. Close enough to go flying again. 

Unrelatedly, there are quite a few more people hanging around on the practice field than there were yesterday or this morning. 

Mariga doesn't want to go flying again. She wants to hang out in the library until it closes, working on blueprints while in a state where she can test things. Being able to change the properties of materials in a way that doesn't require charge to maintain is a potential game-changer for her robot body, at least if her power can be applied to parts of her magiform. 

She is not interrupted in this endeavour. At least not until the library does, in fact, close for the night. 

That's plenty of time to get a lot of blueprints done, and to test whether she can in fact enchant parts of her own magiform.

If the library closes before she runs out of charge, she can go experiment on the practice field some more! Probably everyone else has long since gone home. 

She doesn't have that much charge. She'll run out after an hour or so of use, even spending most of that time doing magic experiments. On the plus side, it looks like Mariga can enchant parts of her magiform, but it's much costlier than enchanting regular objects. 

Every minute of experiments helps. She hauls herself home in human form, thinking about tradeoffs. If there's no ongoing maintenance cost to enchanting parts of herself, in the long run it can still be worth doing once she reaches escape velocity. But she thinks she can manage a design that works solely with nonmagically possible materials, even if some of them have to be in shapes that would be extremely difficult to nonmagically manufacture. 

The next day she doesn't have any high-priority experiments she needs to do before class, so she flies to school and goes looking for her magical classmates. Not being the only one in the school is nice.

How about that kid over there, just slowing down from a fast-moving orange blur? 

Unlike Mariga, he still looks mostly human, the main exceptions being catlike ears and a matching tail. His swooshy orange cape is definitely not in compliance with the school dress code. 

"Hello!" she says, touching down in front of him. She's a cyborg today, with metal skin and structural members but still full of organs in between. Still, it's progress. "Idona, right?"

"Yep! Uh, I have...no idea who you are. Nice look, though!" 

"Mariga. I'd've been shocked if you'd somehow recognized me. And thanks! Yours is neat too. Do they let you wear the cape in class?"

"I dunno, it's new. Maybe I'll keep it and find out!" Idona zips a few feet to one side and back again, cape billowing behind him when he stops.

"Man, I felt so proud of this form before I saw you this morning. You just put my whole look to shame—I mean, blue robot dragon centaur? How did you even come up with that?" 

"I miiiight have been fantasizing about magic for the past several years." Self-deprecating chuckle. "I just kept wanting more limbs! And you should totally be proud of your look, it's classy."

Dramatic gasp. "Really? Oh no!" 

Idona looks down at his outfit as though seeing it with new eyes, making a show of being horrified as he twists and turns to try and see it all at once.

"That's not what I was going for at all! I'll have to start over again!" 

Mariga cracks up.

Idona grins and starts making silly changes to his form—extending his nose to a ridiculous length for a second, then turning his ears into cabbages and back, and so on. 

More giggles! Mariga will reciprocate with a brief period of rainbow zebra stripes.

Idona runs out of charge and drops out of magiform just as it's getting to be time to head to class. The biggest difference, other than the cat ears, is that his regular clothes are shades of grey, green and blue instead of orange and red. 

"Oops. Guess I'll test the cloak against the dress code another day." He doesn't seem too bothered.

"...aaaand I'm gonna be late for class now I don't have superspeed. Nice meeting you!" 

"Nice meeting you too!" Mariga doesn't have super speed either, so she had better book it. Once she's back to being iridescent blue everywhere instead of a glorious Lisa Frank eyesore.

Mariga still has plenty of charge left when she gets to class, but the teacher frowns when she ducks through the door. 

"I don't know which of my students you are," he says, "but if you want to be a part of this class, you're going to have to pick a shape that can sit at a desk."

"Pero Mariga, and at some point I'm going to look like this full-time, but by then I'll have looked into desk options more. Or I can just stand at one of the ones in the back row?" Standing indefinitely is actually pretty comfortable, with all these legs to share the weight.

"...I suppose you can try that." He sighs. "But if you're disrupting the rest of the class I'll have to ask you to change back." 

"Okay." Mariga parks behind a desk in the back row, on the far side from the door so nobody will need to squeeze past her. The desk isn't quite at the ideal height, which is annoying for about five seconds before she realizes she can just shorten her legs a bit. She doesn't do anything she expects to disrupt class, just stands there taking notes.

Class is somewhat disrupted anyway by people turning around to stare at her, but the teacher aggressively ignores the distraction and goes on with the lesson as normal, and they settle down after five minutes or so.

Mariga runs out of charge at some point in the middle of that class. 

Mariga stretches her charge out as far as she can with careful note-taking, then pulls the chair she had pushed aside back over and collapses into it. Hopefully everyone was done staring and doesn't see her wince. There's a gap in her notes while she deals with the crash, but by the end of the period she's back on an even keel and slowly charging again.

The teacher, either considerately or coincidentally, refrains from calling on her while she's recovering from the transformation. 

A few people are surprised at the end of class to see her back in human form, and pepper her with questions on the way to the next class. 

"Did you turn back on purpose?" "What does it feel like to change shape?" "Is it weird having four legs?"  

Conversation is a welcome distraction, and by the end of class she's mostly got her equilibrium back.

"No, I ran out of charge. Eventually I hope to be able to stay transformed all day."

"Changing doesn't feel like anything but the shapes feel different. The different limbs, obviously, but also the magiform feels more . . . present? Like I'm getting my senses directly with less anything else in between."

"Honestly having four legs feels more sensible than having two. It's easier to balance, and easier to stand still for long periods, and just generally nice."

There are a few more questions, but then they have to get moving. 

The rest of the school day passes uneventfully other than Mariga recovering a bit more than a third of her charge. 

Mariga's new routine ends up pretty similar to her old one, but she flies to and from school and spends the time thus saved on magic practice and robot design. It won't be long before she has a fully mechanical magiform and a better understanding of what she can do with enchanting objects.

Enchanting objects gets easier and easier as she refines her magiform and gains more charge to work with, and also as Mariga gets a better idea of what she's doing. The default thing her magic does to an object—as she discovered with her initial attempt to do unspecified magic to a blade of grass—is to make it glow, blue unless she specifies another colour. That remains one of the easiest changes to make, alongside changing the colour. Other properties, like texture, smell, or rigidity, are more difficult. So far, all her enchantments eventually fade, but they last longer than they did at first. The magic seems to think she could figure out how to do permanent enchantments, but it's out of reach for now. 

Another thing that's not quite within her reach just yet is programmable enchantments, ones designed to change after they're put in place. It feels like there must be a trick to it, a way to make them stick without needing a top-up of charge every time, but it's eluding her for now. 

And then one evening a large ball of swirling ice-blue energy appears in the middle of her room, spits out a man, and vanishes. 

The man is dressed in blue robes, in a style which she'll recognise from history lessons or art museums as Ancient Etrelatan, the antique culture that dominated in this part of the world before modern Azama and its neighbours. He's also just collapsed on her bedroom floor.

...and he might have had wings a moment ago? 

Mariga is doing her homework in human form and not at all expecting this!

"Aaaaa!" It takes her a moment to realize that the unexpected thing is a collapsed person, but then she adds "Oh no, are you alright?" She bends over him and tries to see if he's breathing, brain a fog of Oh no and What.

He is indeed breathing! Also groaning and, after a moment, trying to sit up.

He blinks at Mariga and says something in what's probably Ancient Etrelatan. 

She gives him some space, such as there is between her bed, her desk, and her bookshelf. "Do you speak Makazo?"

The man levers himself up to lean on his elbows and says something else, tone wry and self-deprecating in a way that suggests the words are something along the lines of 'Yeah, I let myself in for that one.'

He looks around the room with a confused expression, as though he's never seen anywhere like it and isn't sure how he feels about that yet. 

Possibly it is time for charades. She points at herself and says "Mariga", then pulls up a map of the continent and points at where they are on it.

"...Marel," he introduces himself absently, leaning forward to peer at the map in fascination. After some squinting at coastlines and muttering to himself, he points to the same location with a nod. 

So, if she understands him right he's where he was trying to go. Which leaves, given his clothing and speech, the question of when. She goes over the words for numbers on her fingers and then tries to tell him what year it is.

He nods, seeming unsurprised, and gives her a number that's lower by a few thousand years. 

Wow! That's quite a long time. She pulls up a translation site on her wrist comp and sets it up to translate back and forth between Makazo and ancient Etralatan, and says "I expect you have many questions. I do too."

"...Did the magic come back?" 

"Came back? I didn't know there was any before a hundred years ago. But, uh, yes, magic exists now."

"Good." 

He thinks for a few seconds, and then asks something that comes through translation as: "Are my people remembered? Our words survive; did our deeds?" 

It transpires that the easiest way for Mariga to answer this is to show Marel the SimpleWorld page on the Ancient Etrelatans. 

The Ancient Etrelatan civilisation was dominant in the Etrelatan region (covering parts of modern-day Azama, Gidran, Parabi and Lateria) from around the 14th century BCE to the start of the Common Era (0 CE).^[1][2][3] It was preceded by the Erenian civilisation and succeeded by the Etrelatan Dark Age.^[4][5]

...renowned for their art, culture, and philosophy...

...considered the basis of modern ideals of state governance...often called the "cradle of civilisation"...

...was in this period that worship of the Seven first became widespread, replacing or subsuming older religions in the area.^[21] Most of the myths and legends about the gods, as well as the majority of surviving religious texts, originate from this period or shortly afterward.^[22][23]

Mariga lets him wiki-walk on her laptop until he feels sufficiently caught up. She's curious whether anything he looks at turns out to be inaccurate or distorted; it's not often you get to hear a perspective on ancient history from someone who was actually there.

That would probably be historically fascinating, but right now Marel is making interesting faces at a page about the Seven Gods. It's written from a modern perspective, as the worship of the Seven is still the dominant religion in Azama and its neighbours, but the core of the religion hasn't changed much since Marel's time. There's no obvious reason why he should be staring at a list of the names of the Seven, a string of emotions passing across his face too quickly to decipher. 

...Jurah the Judge, Emarelin the Healer, Banora and Hanora the Two-Faced God, Anadi the Smith, Colasen the Soldier, Zhaene the Stargazer and her consort Thadanor the Stormbringer.^[3] This list is widely...

"Is something wrong?"

Marel shakes himself. "I was...surprised, that you still follow the same gods. Even after so long..." 

"Were you expecting the gods to change, or just the religion?"

"Both, I suppose. I didn't think the whole thing would survive this long." 

He scrolls through the wiki page some more, reads the part about how people seeing or speaking to the gods has become much less common since the end of the Ancient period, and snorts. 

"I guess the gods have changed some, if they don't speak to people as much. Either that or everyone else has changed."

"One or the other, yes." 

Marel looks around and blinks as something occurs to him. "Is this your bedchamber? I'm sorry, I've been very rude. Should we go somewhere else?" 

"We can go somewhere else if you don't mind me needing to explain you to my parents."

"That sounds like a good plan. Unless your parents are likely to react badly?" 

"I think they'll be shocked, but they'll deal with it? Probably it will go better if we tell them now than if I act like you're a secret. And presumably you'll want to interact with people in general sooner or later."

"Yes, you've been very helpful, but I would like to speak to more than one person in this new era eventually." 

Downstairs they go, then? 

Downstairs they go! Margaret explains the situation to her parents, who are initially suspicious that Marel is up to unspecified No Good but calm down eventually. And then they can hang out in the living room, which has the advantage of not being a bedroom and therefore having multiple chairs.

Marel sinks into one with a groan of relief before asking if he might trouble them for something to eat and drink. 

Mariga can totally raid the pantry on his behalf. "I don't know if any of this is like what you're used to. Anything in particular you're hoping we've got?"

"I must learn to adapt to the tastes of this new world sooner or later." 

While he eats, perhaps Mariga can teach him what these foods are called in Makazo, and also a bunch of other useful vocabulary words so they no longer have to communicate entirely through the translation app on her smartwatch. 

That's a good plan. She starts with nouns so they can do it by pointing, then goes back to the translation app for some verbs and uses that to explain basic grammar.

Marel is an attentive student, although not a brilliant one. Despite his obvious age, both his hearing and his short-term memory seem fully functional, and he asks intelligent questions. It seems as though he's had some practice learning languages. 

That's good, because Mariga has very little experience teaching him. But the translation app helps a lot. At one point she refers to her magic in an example sentence and realizes she hadn't previously mentioned she's a mage.

"How exciting! It has been...well, a long time, even in my memory, since I last met a new mage. There were so few of us, by the end..."